mcaravey

I was trying to root out Creative Cloud a few weeks back and it just refused to go away. Turns out there's a separate cleaner tool that you have to download to uninstall Creative Cloud:

https://helpx.adobe.com/in/creative-cloud/apps/troubleshoot/...

I think that part of the problem is a want versus a need. I don't particularly care if me and my wife don't sit together. We see each other all the time. But I don't want to have my four-year-old sitting in between two strangers, six rows in front of me where I can't see him. That's not fair to the two strangers, but also I don't trust strangers.

I get the idea of paying for the privilege, but at the same time, it's not like they roll out the red carpet for someone who flies with their kids. Pretty much every time that I can remember them ever rearranging seats to get us together, we always wind up sitting in the rows at the very back of the plane close to the bathroom, which is fine with me. If I wanted red carpet treatment, I'd pay for first class for everyone. But I'm not about to do that.

All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit. At a minimum, if they went that route, I would want there to be a guaranteed payment to be able to get everyone to sit together. That way I can at least plan for the extra cost. Knowing airlines they would probably use a sliding scale based on age or something.

There have been some interesting projects, like PHP on .NET [0] They have a version of Wordpress compiled into a NuGet package for Asp.Net Core [1]

[0] https://www.peachpie.io [1] https://www.nuget.org/packages/PeachPied.WordPress.AspNetCor...

I would consider the documented performance targets [0] for a standard Azure Blob account to be very good. We're talking 60 Gbps in/120 Gbps out, with 20,000 requests per second as the default request rate.

From what I can tell, the S3 request rate is about 9,000 requests per second [1] split between reads and writes for a single partition. From my perspective it really just depends on what you're trying to build but I don't see the performance of Azure Storage as being an issue in any way for a typical application.

Partitioning will also depend heavily on what kind of application you're building, but the documentation does point out that load balancing will kick in once it starts to see a lot of traffic on a partition [2]. Since you have to use partitioning for S3 in order to get better performance, I don't really see how that's a point against Azure.

As for SDKs [3] I have no idea how good support is, but they all have commits within the last day.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/scala...

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/optimi...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storag...

[3] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

You can select exactly which monitors along with changing the order of monitors. It does require editing the file directly though.

https://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-remote-desktop-in-full-...

These activities remind me a lot of playing SimCopter. Nothing quite beets the anxiety of getting shot at by some baddies in the city I built while trying to drop a rope ladder on a train. Great times.

Generally, I really appreciate them putting stuff like this in the game though. Even though I’ve played flight simulator since the early days, I’ve always had a hard time engaging because I don’t enjoy flying for flying’s sake. It’s also part of the reason why I prefer the Forza games or other arcade racers over pure simulators. Obviously I’m not cultured enough but then again, I’m also a very casual gamer.

Absolutely! I remember adding a bunch of rail to my cities just so I could do more train rescues or catching robbers on the trains. It was huge fun at the time…

Louis Rossmann works there now, and he has put out a number of videos about them over the past few months. The first couple of minutes of this video gives a nice overview:

https://youtu.be/vawcnCv1_1w

His summarized description is "FUTO is an organization that seeks to give users back control of their technology".

I’ve used it to write out 45 minute long lesson plans, help write complicated text message where all I’ve got is a bunch of points to make, I’ve had it correct my Portuguese since I’m not a native speaker, I’ve had it give me a baseline SQL table design to achieve a specific goal, I’ve had it come up with different ways to phrase things since I’m not creative enough, I’ve had it write marketing copy, created design briefs for my graphic design team, and on… I happily pay for it because it’s just nuts how much of a force multiplier it is for me.

Maybe not, but they do look at that one because a bunch of books are totally in favor, and a bunch are either against it or ignore it, so coming up with a definitive answer was a reasonable thing to do. Other examples of time savers would be when to add fats and salts in a dough, and proofing and punching times.

I’d need to double check, but I could have sworn that Tartine did have an autolyse where they have you wait a half hour before adding the salt and last bit of water. I don’t have the book handy at the moment though…

Nice, I’d love to have participated in their testing processes. They obviously treated it like a science and questioned a ton of institutional wisdom, and the results were fantastic.

Yeah, it was an investment for sure. But it has allowed us to save a ton of time every day (e.g. save 30 minute on the autolyse), make tweaks to our recipes to match our processes, change our starters (use stiff levain instead of poolish for certain breads), and a bunch of other details. Not needed for the lay-person. For sourdough I’d opt for the Tartine books.

Oh, I do software by trade. The bakery is because it started as a family business that I helped get off the ground. My background is in B2B payments and construction software. Even though the bakery doesn’t make as much money as software, there’s a whole other world of experience to be gained by running a blue collar business that runs 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. Very very different that a software shop.

But to your point, most ERP planning software for bakeries sucks badly, like really badly. One of the prominent ones you can purchase today runs off a JET database from the 90s, with the “cloud” version just being Citrix access to a VM. but they all seem to universally require you to print out paper every day for every shift, so a ton of people just fall back on Excel (using bakers math) to pan production, daily. My software runs on an iPad that is kept at each station for kind of shift, and it spits out packing sheets and invoices from Quickbooks, and integrates with our delivery route planner. It would be a full time job to be calculating everything from mix quantities to how to pack the final product, without mistakes, 7 days a week.

There definitely needs to be better tools for the lay-person though. None of my staff can make changes to our custom software, but also it is basically impossible to recreate it with low/no-code tools. Hence Excel…

Commercial baker here. One place where this kind of math gets really weird is when the recipe uses multiple kinds of flours. We make a loaf that uses three kinds of flour, so this means a recipe will have flour percentages that are less than 100%, but that sum to 100% so the hydration percentage works.

For example, the recipe might say: Bread Flour 80%, Whole Wheat Flour 15%, and Rye Flour 5%. Personally I prefer just treating all ingredients as relative weights, and only convert to bakers math if needed. That is in large part because I wrote the software that is used on the production floor which spits out ingredient weights in grams, and no bakers math needed. It also keeps it simple for the employees, so they don’t have to learn how these ratios work.

I’ll also mention that the absolute best book on bread ever is the Modernist Bread set [0]. It’s pricey, but there are extremely well explained reasons behind certain methods, and debunking a lot of long held beliefs such as the efficacy of the autolyse.

[0] https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-bread/

One of my favorite ways to show off enumerables to someone is with an endless list. It really makes someone think when I show an IEnumerable instance that contains every prime number, for example [0].

Obviously you can never evaluate the whole thing, but because of the lazy evaluation you can get enumerators and pull out values all day long. Just don’t .ToList() the darn thing.

[0] https://gist.github.com/arlm/6647474#file-sieveoferatosthene...

Yeah, which is probably why they cost thousands of dollars :(

They do get programmed to compensate for the specific hearing loss of the individual, but if there was an easy way to take a hearing test and program the earbuds at home to match, that would be amazing. The transparency mode on the Apple AirPods already uses the mic to pass through sound, but I don’t know of any way to amplify specific frequencies or to transmit sound from one side to the other (for one-sided deafness).

Apple AirPods can behave a bit like a hearing aid. You can use the Live Listen feature on an iPhone to get an idea [0].

I’ve got a modern set of hearing aids that I actually ordered last week. They have Bluetooth built in, so they will actually function as earbuds themselves, allowing me to answer calls or listen to music and so on. So the reverse is already happening where the hearing aid acts as headphones.

One last thing to consider is that ear buds occlude the ear completely, where some hearing aids (like mine) are designed to physically allow sound through. In my case it’s better than total occlusion since one of my ears only has partial loss (total loss in the other).

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209082

I took apart a 650,000 BTU oven burner this morning for cleaning, and had to clean out the oven exhaust damper that was starting to get build-up. Soon I’ll be at my desk programming again thankfully.

We bought the Concept2 SkiErg and Rower a while back specifically because they were used in gyms in the area and held up to daily abuse well. The quality is fantastic considering we paid about $800 each. Highly recommend the Concept2 equipment.

My bank tried to add typing heuristics on the password box years ago. It wouldn’t lock you out, but you had to go through extra verification steps if you failed. I failed the test pretty much every time I logged in, and I’m sure it happened a lot because 6 months later it was gone. In that use case it was an extra attempt at locking down bank access, which I can appreciate, but I hated that it was wrong most of the time.

At the bakery I run we have to make a small number of extras of each product to account for issues (e.g. malformed roll, dropped on the floor while packing, sliced incorrectly, etc.). When we first investigated places to donate the edible excess products, most places wouldn’t accept it, were only open one day a week, required us to deliver the excess during the four hour window they accepted donations, and so on. As a result a lot of stuff goes to the trash, and is treated as the cost of goods sold. It sucks, but to avoid that we’ve got our in-house software dialed in to avoid as much waste produced as possible and we donate the excess whenever we can.

No one said we are exploiting our workers. That's just an assumption being made because it is not possible to pay everyone huge wages.

And I am aware that labor creates value, but not all labor is equal. No one questions if a junior developer should earn as much as a senior/partner/staff engineer, but it's very much the same here. I ask someone to roll some dough into a ball and that I'll pay them $17/hour to do that. Some people will be faster and produce better balls, while others will be slow and produce lumpy round things. They are not producing the same quality and quantity but the cost to me is still $17/hour, therefore on paper one is more valuable than the other. That's not a heartless or mean way of looking at it, that is literally a required part of costs of goods sold. Ingredients and labor dictate how much each ball of dough costs to make.

We try our best to take care of our employees because they are so important, and you won't find a single one of them that says we are exploiting them. But they are not software people, and the dynamic is very different in the world of manual labor.

Yes. I do run a software company as well, but the bakery is a family business that will be sticking around. We are considering selling the custom software I wrote to other bakeries to manager their production.

Oh, don't get me wrong, it's a viable business. The issue I am bringing up is the disconnect between white-collar workers and blue-collar workers.

Blue collar work is by definition manual labor. Low skill labor goes in, product comes out. You have to constantly provide labor in order to create value. Software is very different because once it has been written it continues to provide value without constant input (yes, I'm ignoring maintenance and such). In theory the software can provide exponential amounts of value compared to the cost of labor. In that case sure, increasing the wages won't have a meaningful impact on the company income.

With blue collar work, and our in particular, there is a direct correlation between the cost of the labor and the profit from the product. The kinds of people we might employ have 1) zero experience, 2) troubled past that wouldn't pass a background check, 3) little to no education (many never finished high school), or any other multitude of reasons. These are vastly different kinds of people than what you might find in a white collar job.

In a business based on blue collar work, you really only have two choices: increase sales prices in order to pay employees more and hope the market will bear it. If not, you can pay employees market rates and keep the doors open. We have plans to start offering health insurance and benefits to all our employees, in addition to raising wages, so there's that to consider...

We’ve seen a lot of issues with hiring at the bakery I run. Minimum wage is already very high in Oregon at $14 (will likely increase next year). We pay more than that for our entry-level jobs, buts we’ve found it’s very hard to compete with the big companies. Our delivery driver position has to compete with $20/ hour starting wage + full benefits + $3000 signing bonus offered by Amazon contractors for zero experience. Yes, we’ve had to increase our wages, but people still don’t want to work.

We’ve had people come in thinking that we were like the baking shows you see on Netflix, just making fun cute things all day. They get scared of the work. A lot of younger applicants have a distinct air of entitlement, that their work is so incredibly valuable, even though they’ve never had working experience before. I can’t (literally can’t) pay these people huge wages. They don’t provide enough value, and no customer is willing to pay the associate price increases to the product to compensate the wage increase. If everyone agreed that paying $10 on a croissant was acceptable, then sure we could pay more, but it’s not purely the decision of the business owners.

I’m aware that we could just increase prices, pay better wages, etc. But there’s a very real risk to the business when making a large price change. We sell to a lot of other businesses, and they are sensitive to price changes. So while I’d love to hire and pay people extremely well, we can’t simply decide to pay more and have it work.

All that said, about half our employees are quite young (not teens though). They are usually the most energetic and willing to learn, but they are also the most unreliable (ghost, quit with no notice, untruthful about time off, etc). Managing people is way harder than it looks…

I currently own and run a bakery. We sell breads and pastries, and generally avoid anything custom, such as fancy cakes. We have things figured out enough that we’ll hire people with no experience on the spot and train them up. We start by having them work the table, meaning they shape the dough into the final products. Its fairly safe, and as long as there is supervision its not usually hard. From there they can pick where they want to train next, be it mixing, ovens, or something else.

As for my own training, I did not have any schooling or apprenticeship. What helped me was to hire someone with experience. The baker we hired didn’t have a grasp of fundamentals (why certain things are done), but he knew enough of the mechanics to get us going. I spent a lot of time reading, researching, and learning the underlying science of things. Also I was just crazy enough to make large changes in production with minimal testing until things worked. Changes such as swapping out starter types in a dough…

As for the job market: we are having an extremely hard time finding people. In Oregon minimum wage is $14/hour but you can drive for Amazon for over $20. Trying to strike a balance with labor costs and product costs has been very difficult, especially with Covid. Last time I priced out ingredients, a baguette cost less than $0.15, but the rest of the cost is 100% people. So we spent a ton of time getting less people involved. Today we can comfortably bake about 1000lbs of dough with one person mixing, two on the tables, and one on the ovens.

One essential part of our operations is the custom software I wrote for managing the production floor. We track orders for customers in the software and on the day for baking the mixer just uses the iPad for how much dough to make, how much batter to mix, and how much of each ingredient to weigh. Then the shapers see a list of what breads to make out of each dough, and then the bakers get to see what should be baked. Because the software automatically calculates all the quantities, the production process is MUCH less mentally challenging and basically runs on autopilot. We are looking to actually cleanup and resell the software to bakeries.

And finally, is it a good career? Depends a lot. We only have one location, so as a baker there’s only so much you can climb up the ladder. If you really wanted to make a good career you’ll need to learn all the jobs and learn them well. Then make your way into management with all the knowledge you now have. If you really wanted to climb, you’ll jump over to a large company or one thats looking to become large. Be aware that large bakeries are very different in many ways from small operations. Our bakery is looking to grow a lot, and we need people to make it happen. We are projecting to open a second production facility in a few years, and we would be looking to hire all sorts of positions, including shift managers, general production managers, and there would likely also be a production manager over both facilities. The downside is that if you’re in it because you enjoy touching the products, then too high up the management ladder you climb, the less that’ll happen.

With all that said, it’s extremely hard to own a bakery, especially starting out. The capital expenditure is huge. Yes, the margins you get are pretty good. We are hovering around a 50% gross margin now which is great, but we need to increase the volume of product we move. I still write a ton of code for my other startup that we are trying to launch soon (finance, not baking). I personally enjoy baking a lot, but I have waaaay more skill with the computer, so I’m stuck balancing where to spend my hours in the day. Becoming a baker depends a lot on what you want to do with yourself.

I run a bakery and the incentives to keep our employees happy is high. The cost of employee turn over via lost tribal knowledge and the cost of finding new people far outweighs taking care of the employees. Yes, one side of the business requires me to plug employee capacity and capability into calculations of the cost of goods, but stopping at simply labor is short-sighted. I pay more than minimum wage not only for skill, but to grow loyalty. It is because of capitalism we don’t treat employees simply as labor.

That pressure is alive and well at places I've worked (USA). I used to finish my work day at 3pm, and I always made sure to leave at exactly 3pm. I would often get sideways looks and jealous vibes from my coworkers, even though everyone knew I was done at 3. No one ever really paid attention to the fact I was showing up to work at least a couple of hours before them, and the feeling that I was "cheating" by leaving early never really went away. The pressure was there all the time to stay longer, and honestly it really irritated me. We were given core hours to be in the office but because others made the choice to come in later I was left feeling like I did something "bad" due to comments and other implied communication.

These days I run my own place, but the pressure to work longer hours is due to so much needing to get done that can't be completed in 8 hour days. Self-inflicted pressure is way worse because I can't get up and leave it behind.