tenacious_tuna
They also drive me crazy since we tend to have many of them with relatively little actionable output, but as others have said what tends to happen in the wake of these is the technical people backchannel our own conversations about what needs doing and the sequencing of what we should build to meet the evolving product vision.
What frustrates me is when I complain about there being many meetings on my calendar I'm told to just decline them, but then I'm effectively ceding authority since the time to voice opposition to a particular plan or task is in whatever meeting I'm declining.
Perhaps all of the above is more prevalent in product-led orgs rather than engineering-led orgs, I'm curious if people on the other side of the spectrum have different anecdotes.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
It's not a "preferable" strategy, it's one that can (and should) be deployed in tandem with expanding our renewable generation and doing more "at scale" conservation of commercial resource use.
We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0], _and yet_ we're not even capitalizing on that gain as much as we could because people don't want to tolerate the behavior changes necessary to do so.
My beef isn't with expanding capacity, it's with that being the _only_ solution that's considered to match supply to demand instead of doing anything to manage demand.
OP was making a fair point that not everybody has the same amount of time and energy (or money) to tolerate shifts in their routine, which in the context of a "personal vs collective responsibility" style argument is entirely reasonable.
By the same token, if only the _rich_ have the freedom to make such behavior changes for the sake of conservation it will only ever have a token impact, and in many cases the "correct" level to make an efficiency pitch at is the community: a decent light rail system will always outperform everyone driving their own vehicle to work/the store/downtown in terms of space and energy efficiency.
...but, to get people to buy into such "collectivist" systems, you often have to get them to contend with some perceived reduction in personal convenience: yes, a train doesn't need a parking lot and uses less gas per passenger-mile, but then you're beholden to the train schedule. It's exactly _that_ sentiment that I find frustrating in advocating for sustainable civic design.
To OP's point: whatever that "collectivist" option is necessarily has to contend that standards of accessibility and convenience are not constant across the population. That doesn't inherently mean "the poor should consume more," but that "hang dry your laundry" isn't an option for everyone in the current dominant socioeconomic structure.
> Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
I'm not saying _everybody_ must use less AC/clothes dryer/whatever. Grids are remarkably complex machines and are incredibly expensive to upgrade--which we should do! We should have done that ages ago, but the second best time to plant a tree is now. However, that's not an instantaneous process and requires quite a lot of political willpower to achieve, let alone the capex to bring new generation plants online.
In the meantime, as you've noted, people die without access to critical infra, i.e. AC in heatwaves. If the options facing grid operators are "rolling brownouts to keep from blowing up a transformer" or "educate people on time-of-day use re: peak load to reduce grid strain," the latter is often dismissed out of hand when it seems a perfectly sane approach to maximizing the utility of existing systems.
> deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc
Solar has a tremendous to "democratize" access to resources [0], we should absolutely incentivize its adoption as much as possible... but changing regulatory or tax environments is difficult. *We should still do that,* but altering behavior is (comparatively) free, so long as you can get past people being personally offended for being asked to not water their lawn every day in July.
Chicago building codes require 68F as a minimum for residential in winter conditions, so I think that's reasonable as a "habitable minimum yet not necessarily ideal" benchmark: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bldgs/supp_info/chicag...
Reasonable point, but I feel my case still stands: the population able to make these changes could do so, enabling existing infra (and housing stock) to "go further" before requiring expensive and disruptive overhaul.
> the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps
I agree this is shortsighted, and it's better to incentivize more efficient systems rather than applying punitive strategies to less efficient ones.
Excellent point, and I agree, though the vast, vast majority of the pushback I feel I get when advocating for these kinds of shifts are from wealthy/healthy individuals.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario: existing resources should be able to support our current level of creature comforts with minor conservation, even if a segment of the population is less able to support the conservation efforts, but the extremes people demand in turn place extreme load on our infrastructure.
I'd argue there's more ecologically sound ways to supply the desired energy demand in combination with shifting some of the load away from peak times. I don't think that strictly correlates to "a lower standard of living" so much as "there's minor behavioral changes that would more efficiently use existing resources."
> Making peoples lives worse to save money
This is exactly the mentality that I'm surprised by: I suggest shifting high energy use slightly and your reaction is "that will make my life worse." Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight for your towels/sheets/whatever if it meant 50% cheaper power?
I'm not saying human convenience should entirely take a backseat to machine efficiency; to your point, the very existence of these things is to make human life easier. My frustration is that Western approaches to these problems seem uniquely resistant to ever altering behavior for the sake of reducing ecological impact.
(Dishwashers were a poor example for me to use anyway, they're remarkably efficient; a better one might be water usage: it's best to water plants in either the early morning or late evening, so the water doesn't evaporate as much, but people often prefer to do so during the day, which coincides with high household water usage for showers/laundry/whatever. though, I routinely run my dishwasher overnight and have never had issues with grime, so long as I prime the hot water feed.)
Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.
This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
So it's science inasmuch as anything with n=1 repeatability can be science
That said, your point that they're probably more interested in information control than spying on everyone's traffic is a good call out, and would change their methodology. My issue was more with your statement that they can't magically downgrade modern encryption; MITM via OS cert store 'compromise' isn't magic, but I think it's certainly possible in a threat model where your adversary is a nation-state.
I mean... They could, though, no? If they control the gateways they could drop any traffic that isn't encrypted with some root cert that allows them to decrypt in transit packets.
whyfor? I guess I don't know how I would price "get there faster" in a reasonable way.
> separating freight from rail on major routes
that does seem to often be the limiter in North American passenger rail, but I don't know how economically feasabile it is to separate the two. I assume railroads are moderately expensive to maintain.
It's entirely different. One is fingerprinting ambient audio against a corpus of known signatures to identify music, another is basically silently monitoring and summarizing every conversation it hears for later review.
I don't feel like my privacy is being invaded by a date's phone telling them what song was playing at the restaurant, but I would be disturbed if their phone produced a summary of our conversation, especially if any vulnerable topics came up.
This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.
> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
This I agree with, though.
This, combined with grocery stores coallating your purchases by loyalty program or credit card number, Spotify tracking everything you listen to, smart TVs tracking what you watch... What information _isn't_ available on a random citizen?
Combine this with a seemingly constant stream of data breaches on SSNs or photo IDs, it feels impossible to meaningfully protect my own privacy at this point.
or if you excelled at some topics which you found interesting but did middlingly or poorly at others...
I watched the skepticism form then evaporate in my psychiatrist as I explained that I did relatively well in school overall... except for the three or four classes I thought were boring, and how I consistently procrastinated but managed to pull off decent work right before hand.
(I got diagnosed after 30, though apparently my elementary school wanted to screen me.)
> But I can't escape the next step which is that you still have to do go out and do all the same stuff anyway
That's exactly what I was afraid of, but it turns out that actually getting dopamine for completing tasks goes a long way to blunting the existential dread of there being yet more tasks. Consistently now whenever I feel crappy it correlates back to either (a) crap sleep or (b) forgot to take my meds.
Just my 2c, YMMV, everyone's different, etc. I had a hard time really understanding the anecdotes I got from medicated friends myself, but I'd encourage others who suspect they have ADHD to try even a very low dose of something for ~3 weeks and see how they feel after. I'm at the lowest "clinically effective" dose of my prescription and the effect is still significant.
To say nothing of ads themselves or CTAs or cookie consent banners or...
I'd frequently gripe about how much I felt my attention was fractured as an adult to my grandfather, between taxes or coordinating with service providers or whatever, and his response would frequently be "I'm retired and I can't keep up!"
It does feel that there's pressure in many avenues of life to capture and fracture people's attention.
Is that not just markdown? is there a specific way of formatting docs that's "friendly" to LLMs now?
She ended up disabling the alerts entirely, which seemed a shame to me, but the ear splitting siren every 5minutes wasn't really conducive to our sanity or our dog's or our ability to actually hear the weather radio.
Moreover, it's a huge pain to get to the history of emergency alerts, which seems like a design flaw. Surprising how poorly a critical life system can be designed.