pauljonas

24" and not 27" monitor?

Would have bought one otherwise.

Still using that 2019 MBP (16 inch, 16G memory) as a daily work machine.

Is still handling the load well, though at times, fans get quite loud, especially with all the background processes and VM setups.

Hope to get a new MBP this year, as being on Intel means lots of software that won't run on it (ie, Codex app for example, won't run on Intel Macs)

Yes.

Partly because of ephemeral nature of most cloud platforms / services, and also the vagaries of proprietary specific configuration.

No.

These factors that I'm speaking of were more along the lines of:

- a slab caster implemented, but there is already a bloom caster and only one crane facility to support both so both ran at less than optimal throughput.

- choosing to prioritize far less profitable slab casting for output to a joint venture plant in CA than very profitable bloom casting (& union definitely not in favor of this)

- buying coke at 10X price they could get elsewhere because old buddy favoritism

Basically, the Japanese firms were built a much more holistic basis -- JIT engineering, so that liquid is pored, slabs created and were delivered right into finished product processing. Whereas, by contrast, in the mill I worked at, slabs would be cast, then would cool in a yard, heated & slitted, then heated again for strip mill processing (it cost quite a bit of energy to heat to 2200/2300 degrees).

I mean, my boss & I would even spitball on how much better the place would run if it was bought out and run by (at that time, late 80s / early 90s) a foreign competitor that made decisions on business sense rather than old boy political network machinations.

Basically, all about: MANAGEMENT, MANAGEMENT, MANAGEMENT.

It's been a few decades but I worked for USS as a developer, after attaining a computer science degree.

I know it's a tired old adage that labor / labor unions was the reason for American steel manufacturing decline and rise of Japanese dominance. But from the inside, that simply wasn't so -- it was more a case that Japanese mills not only more modern but the entire manufacturing process, from casting to finished product, was more efficient. Even when new US mills gained new technology, it wasn't thought through and decisions seemed to be made the basis of old boy network than solid business acumen.

There are still many features not working.

I used to search within lists (was like the best feature of Twitter, for my usage) quite a bit -- after Musk gutted the team after taking over, it no longer works, and has been that way for many months.

1. Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein — have read other titles by this author & they were mostly meh, but this is an incredible book, hard to describe, better to experience. Ostensibly is about how the author is often confused with Naomi Wolf who went down conspiracy rabbit holes but it is so much more than that.

2. The Myth of Christian Beginnings by Robert Wilkin — an older title (1971), short well written book on how Christians mythologize early Christians, & frame it as some static model of heavenly perfection that they're always trying to get back to, or maintain

3. Everyday Utopia by Kristen Ghodsee — on the surface, a book about utopian community experiments but is so much more, imaginative conjuring on thinking outside the box, how we blindly just accept things the way they are, so dismissive of nonorthodox ideas

4. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris — just as the title advertises, have read a lot of history but the 19C on California presented here was so interesting

>Sorry, but the Here Comes Everybody phenomenon Clay Shirky predicted has not worked out so well. Public discourse doesn’t work at scale. It’s fine at the corner pub. Watch out for Joe. He says crazy bigoted stuff. Whenever Joe comes in, we stop talking about politics and change the subject to sports. Five people can moderate or avoid the intransigent bigotry of someone in their real community.

>These local, non-scaled examples of public discourse are not a replacement for CNN or the New York Times. But neither is social media, even though so many people now think they’ve got to run to those platforms to get the real story. That’s because the real news networks are turning to twitter as if it were a primary source. Let’s go to Twitter to find out how the public feels about this war. Really? That’s like going to the psych ward at Bellevue to find out how people feel about current events. If you report from X, you’re in even worse shape because Musk has gone and tweaked the whole thing to favor authoritarianism. He’s institutionalized and amplified the worst qualities of the mob.

The clash between professionalism & "everybody gets to play".

It seems we need a CSS: The Good Parts guide here.

Obligatory Cory Doctorow link on enshitification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

A few years back, I wrote a web based publishing tool that used `wkhtmltopdf` to generate PDF from database content along with web images (& even more complicated with API access & Google Maps API). It took a lot of tinkering but it worked. At times, extra fiddling needed to generate accurately the Table of Contents (basic, uses `H1-6` elements in document) with proper page references and formatting. But it worked, even with allotting for stuff like "bleed" (it was being printed a massive color printer we leased that could bind or staple.

This is a thing now when applying for developer jobs.

When I was looking for a job in 2020-2021, I think it happened everywhere I got past the original opening interview round.

Sometimes the task was trivial or even submitting code samples (which can be problematic if the relevant examples were done for a previous proprietary interest that would not be agreeable to share this code). Other cases were more elaborate, requiring a half-day of work or more.

In one instance, I had an assignment for a front end JS / UX page, completed the assignment then heard back from the prospective employer that according to their review of my "homework" submission, I was overqualified for the position.

I mean, you can say "no", but then in all probability the prospective employer is going to proceed to the next candidate.

My own app concoction, written in Ruby & Sinatra and JS-less at the moment, one of these days going to upgrade and enhance as I wrote it while I was out of work during COVID days. As I age I don't have the energy to keep pace with side projects anymore.

After Google Reader I used Feedly for years, even ponying up for a Pro subscription. But I was forced out as they capped on sub total (even as a Pro customer) and I was unable to add new feeds & the tools to identify and prune "dead" feeds (even there, I treat my RSS pool as a stream to wade in when needed / desired and didn't want to delete even inactive feeds, just feeds that got hijacked by spam farms). So I wrote my own.

Initially had grandiose vision of opening it up to anyone but it needs some UX work 1st (and a better DB model than a SQLite DB on a shared host lol).

Absolutely, the WP ecosystem cultivates this mindset.

The reliance on plugins to do a lot of heavy lifting (admittedly, a lot of these stray far from the original blog engine WP provides) but that is because WP is used as more than a blog now, more than a CMS, it's like a core with a myriad of swiss army knife appendages.

Definitely, https://gomakethings.com is what I instantly thought of after reading the OP.

Universal Baseball Association, J Henry Waugh, Prop -- Dice Game

http://sagarin.com/sports/dice.htm

They already have been, since the early 90s & I'm sure most mainframe / COBOL codebases are maintained by offshore staff.

My favorite: https://classless.de/