stoat_meniscus
stoat_meniscus on Hacker News
Yes, Informatica was the one that came to mind.
We inherited some Informatica ETL workflows once at work. Nice at first glance with good logging, but peel back the surface a little bit and it was a dizzying level of hidden complexity. Some of this was business logic which was inherently complex, but it was so deeply buried in menus and abstractions with no easy diffing or version control...
Like the comment starter mentioned - who are these tools designed for?
RISC? Reduced instruction set corvidae
At least 90% is mechanical. The list mentioned above plus corroded traces on circuit boards and broken external connectors (RCA jacks, etc.).
For older components, beyond switches/pots the only other things I've ever had to replace are electrolytic capacitors.
Lots of great equipment at Goodwill and garage sales.
One challenge though with the older CD players is that the laser focusing mechanisms tend to go at some point. Happened to me on a few players. Some of these can be replaced but I imagine it's harder and harder to find the parts now.
One option for Markdown-esque input and Latex output is RMarkdown. RStudio does a nice job of allowing you to write markdown, embed references, code cells, and visualizations. I used it in grad school and only rarely had to drop down to Latex to do something more customized.
https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/
That's a fun idea. Although over time this might select for plants that complain more. You could end up with an entire garden screaming for attention all the time.
Seems analogous to the average faces photography project where the composite faces of a large number of men or women end up being more attractive than you'd imagine for an average person.
The PS3 did something like this. One processing unit of the Cell processor was reserved for the OS while the rest could be used for games.