Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.
This is a non technical hill but it is applicable to my technical career. The hill is that REMOTE WORK WORKS. I am so frustrated that so many businesses are going back to hybrid or full RTO.
RTO is about control and management/owners thinking that everyone else is lazy and would not do anything if not constantly pushed. I believe that is because they are the kind of people who would need that kind of supervision.
The financial side is that making people go to work maintains value. The money you spend on lunch, travel, dry cleaning, maintenance of cars, and the increased value of property near places of business add to the ownership class’s wealth. All that money you spend traveling to/from and while you are at work goes to them. If you save that money by working from home, the wealth stays with you.
RTO mandates are employees reduction schemes, nothing more.
Transparency + blur + drop shadow is peak UI design and should remain so for the foreseeable future. It provides depth, which adds visual context. Elements onscreen should not appear flat; our human predator brains are hardwired and physiologically evolved to parse depth information.
Can you give an example?
Im not him, but theres a tiny shadow underneath the cursor on most windows, probably most everything else. Buttons are slightly 3D looking to appear like they pop out.
What of, more specifically?
An image of the 3 concepts together as you deavribe.
A plain text physical password notebook is actually more secure than most people think. It’s also boomer-compatible. My folks understand that things like their social security cards need to be kept secure and out of public view. The same can be applied to a physical password notebook. I also think a notebook can be superior to the other ways of generating and storing passwords, at least in some cases.
- use the same password for everything: obviously insecure.
- Use complex unique passwords for everything: You’ll never remember them. If complex passwords are imposed as a technical control, even worse if you have to change them often, you’ll just end up with passwords on post-its.
- use a password manager: You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If the manager gets breached there goes everything.
I understand, somewhat, this being discouraged at work but I agree that doing it for personal passwords with the notebook at home is fine. I’ve met people opposed to ever writing down passwords and I think it’s just a rote reaction based on work training.
If you have a notebook at home with all your passwords then somebody needs to break into your house to get them, which is pretty good security.
But will you be diligent enough to make a new password for every single website using this method?
Dynamic typing sucks.
Type corrosion is fine, structural typing is fine, but the compiler should be able to tell if types are compatible at compile time.
This is one of those things like a trick picture where you can’t see it until you do, and then you can’t unsee it.
I started with C/C++ so typing was static, and I never thought about it too much. Then when I started with Python I loved the dynamic typing, until it started to cause problems and typing hints weren’t a thing back then. Now it’s one of my largest annoyances with Python.
A similar one is None type, seems like a great idea, until it’s not, Rust solution is much, much better. Similar for error handling, although I feel less strongly about this one.
Coming from a background where all the datatypes are fixed and static (C, PLCs) it took me so very long to get used to python’s willy nilly variables where everything just kinda goes, until it doesn’t. Then it breaks, but would’ve been fine if we just damn knew what these variables where
Now my brain just goes “it’s all just strings”
Now my brain just goes “it’s all just strings”
Dynamic typing does kinda smell like primitive obsession, now that you’ve brought it to my attention lol
Do you mean type coercion?
Dyac
From my perspective, dynamic typing IS type corrosion!
Type coercion = Allow types to be converted to other types automatically to perform some operations like comparison.
Type corrosion = some non-standard condescending term to say that dynamic typing has no proper rigid types?
It was obviously a typo
It was a typo, but I also wanted to add that type coercion is not dynamic typing, the coercion can be done statically during compile time, so it could not be the 2nd one, even if it wasn’t a typo
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS. You are so valid for this. Static typing is so so so so so useful.
the hill i am willing to die on is: FUCK AI. I’ll be dead before I let it write a single line of code.
if you’re using modern fabrication techniques, a couple 10uf mlcc capacitors in small packages are just as good as traditional decade capacitors (10uf,1uf,0.1uf) for decoupling in pretty much every situation, and you need to worry about less varieties on your bill of materials
There are a load of things in IT where using a processor is the wrong choice, and using an FPGA instead would have made a lot of problems a non-issue.
Is that controversial? I’ve always assumed people avoid FPGAs just because they’re unfamiliar with them.
Tell that to the people who think they will soon replace this expensive and complicated FPGA stuff with something running on a cheap MPU programmed by an intern. For thirty years now…
Yikes.
Welcome to my world.
I think it’s because FPGAs are an intermediate to just making your own ASIC.
If you’re at a scale where making a new ASIC is your go-to, congratulations on your job at Google or Apple. I don’t even know if FaceMeta would do that. Designing and founding a new chip is a whole thing.
If you don’t understand that development, security, and operations are all one job you will constantly make crap and probably point at some other team to make excuses about it, but it will be actually be your fault.
Programs have to run. They have to be able to change to meet needs. Implementing working security measures is one of those needs.
The amount of times I’ve had to slap devs hands that wanted to just disable security or remind security that just shutting it down is denial of service is crazy. If it can’t deploy or is constantly down or uses stupid amount of resources it’s also worthless no matter what it looked like for split second you ran on on the dev machine.
The next patch isn’t going to fucking fix it if no one that writes patches knows about the damn issue. Work arounds are hidden technical debt and you have to assume that they will fucking break on some update later. If you are not updating because it breaks your unreported workarounds you will get ignored by the devs at some point, and they are right in doing so.
If you depend on something communicate with the team that works on it. We can send a fucking petabyte of info around the world and to the moon and back before some people write a fucking Ticket, email, or even a IM. Look dumb and asking the stupid question rather than being an actual idiot and leaving something broken for the next decade. We’re all dumb, it’s why we built computers, get over it and just talk to people. If you really struggle with, don’t just communicate, try to over communicate, say an obvious thing now and again just to keep the dialogue open and test that you really on the same page.
That’s my rant/hill borne from ulcers supporting crappy IT orgs and having to overcome my own shortcomings to actually say something in channels where things can actually change and not just griping in private about it.
We’re all dumb, it’s why we built computers,
I love that.
I don’t know if the basic idea that it’s okay to look dumb will ever catch on, though. There’s a lot of self interest and direct ego motive going against it.
And it’s a balance too that self interest and ego gets alot done too. It’s just getting over protective of ego or too self interested (very hard in an economy where a lot employers are straight up conmen) that leads to these pain points.
I do find in the rooms I’ve had the pleasure of being with the smartest people in a field were always full of reasonably humble people.
Okay, I’m pretty late to the party, but here we go. My field is illustration and art, and especially color theory is something that a lot too often is teached plainly wrong. I think it was in the 1950s when Johannes Itten introduced his book on colortheory. In this book, he states that there are three “Grundfarben” (base colors) that will mix into every color. He explained this model with a color ring that you will still find almost anywhere. This model and the fact that there are three Grundfarben is wrong.
There are different angles from where you can approach color mixing in art, and it always depends on what you want to do. When we speak about colors, we actually mean the experience that we humans have, when light rays fall into our eyes. So, it’s actually a perceptual phenomenon, which means it is actually something that has small statistical differences from individual to individual. For example, a greenish blue might be a little bit more green for one person or a little more blue for the other.
Every color, however, has its opposite color. Everybody can test this. Look into a red (not too bright) light for some time and then onto a white wall. The color you will see is the opposite. They will cancel each other out and become white / neutral.
Ittens colormodel, however, is not based in perception. In this model yellow is opposed to violet, which might mix to a neutral color with pigments but not with lightrays. But even that doesn’t work a lot of times. I mean, even his book is printed in six colors, even though his three basecolors are supposedly enough to print every color…
In history lot of colormodels have been less correct course. What is so infuriating is that in Ittens case, he just plainly ignored the correct colortheory that already existed (by Albert Henry Munsell) and created his own with whatever rules that he believes are correct.
Even today, this model and rules are teached at art schools and you can see his color circle plastered all over the internet.
Tldr: Johannes Ittens colormodel is wrong, even though it’s almost everywhere.
(Added tldr)
Fun fact:
OKLab which was created recently by Björn Ottosson as a hobby project, is a pretty accurate perceptual colorspace. It is open Source and has been adapted by Photoshop for Black and White conversion.
I kinda hope painting apps will also impliment it as a standard model for colopickers.
Professionally: Waterfall release cycle kills innovation, and whoever advocates it should be fired on the spot. MVP releases and small, incremental changes and improvements are the way to go.
Personally: Don’t use CSS if tables do what you need. Don’t use Javascript for static Web pages. Don’t overcomplicate things when building Web sites.
Use tables for presenting tabular data, not for layout of non-tabular data.
If you’d put it in a relational db or spreadsheet, then tables is fine.
THE AMOUNT OF TIMES I SEE PEOPLE USE A TABLE WHEN BULLET POINTS WOULD WORK IS TOO DAMN HIGH. Tables SUCK is you’re putting long paragraphs randomly in specific places and not others.
Don’t use CSS if tables do what you need.
As a web dev, please don’t. Use a table if you have data that should be (re)presented. Don’t use tables for layout. Please use semantic HTML elements, for the love of accessibility.
Weird i haven’t seen this one yet: the cloud is just someone else’s computers.
If you’re selfhosting, the cloud is your someone else’s computer ;)
It is, but I’m ready to officially throw in the towel and embrace the fact that running your own hardware is not much more than a hobby these days. I’ve preached and preached the value of multi or hybrid cloud, only for the people with money to pour it down the same hole time and time again.
I’ve always said IT is essentially an entirely CYA driven industry. Having someone to blame is more valuable for them than uptime, and if they can show their outages, even if the numbers suck, was not their fault (easy to do when all your competitors are down at the same time), it’s all good…
Update- lol, YouTube is currently down.
Geopolitics is kind of coming to the rescue, since it’s bad if your server is subject to a hostile power’s laws. Although it remains to be seen if there’s fundamental change, or just what we call in Canada “maplewashing”.
Hardly a hot take really…
OP didn’t really ask for a hot take…
It was kind of implied, though.
How do you die on a hill if nobody’s fighting you? Is it just a hill suicide? That wasn’t in any war I’ve read about. I guess Life of Brian had something a bit like that.
Dying on the hill doesn’t mean it has to be controversial or a “hot take” IMO, but whatever.
I fucking hate AI in HR/hiring. I try so hard not to spread my personal data to LLMs/AI ghuls and the moment I apply for a job I need to survive I have to accept that the HR department’s AI sorting hat now knows a shit ton about me. I just hope these are closed systems. if anyone from a HR department knows more, please let me know
I’m lucky in that I’ve been in the same job for ages (since before AI) and so I haven’t had to deal with this yet, but a friend of mine was using AI to write his resume recently and I had the thought that the resume is probably being written by an AI, then sent to another AI to read it and that you could conceivably get a job with a resume that no human has ever entirely read. Probably not an original thought but it had never occurred to me before lol.
You could also starve in the street after your résumé is rejected by several levels of LLMs, never having had human eyes land on it once.
Yeah probably the more likely outcome.
Hardly a hot take really…
Sorry to disappoint you personally. I hope the other comments spark joy in you.
Cognitive behavioral therapy/dialectical behavioral therapy are not the universal cure for everything and they need to stop being treated as such
It’s popular because it does work for a lot of things, from fear of spiders to eating disorders. Of course they would try it on as many different problems as possible.
Beats the currently popular “that’s just the way you are and if it affects other people that’s their problem. In fact, you’re actually better than other people.”-therapy
I’ll join you on this hill, soldier.
CBT is the only one they’ve tested, and they tested themselves, and of course they look great. It offloads all success and failure 100% to the victim, and so many failures don’t reflect on the process; ever. It resembles a massive sham.
My counsellor friend calls it “sigma-6 for mental health” and notes how it’s often not covered by insurance (even outside America’s mercenary system) so it’s a nice cash cow for the indu$try.
So what are the alternatives? When I think about non-CBT therapy I think of like, Freud asking about problems with papa und penis, which just from a common sense angle seems more questionable.
I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else’s life and shit your own values all over them.
I don’t drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.
My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.
The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.
RIP those disabled people who’s carers won’t even let them nut, and who definitely don’t have anywhere else to go.
Disabled people are so often treated like children and it just sucks.
Patient autonomy!
Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others (“I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows”), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there’s gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes “seriously affecting others”, and there’s going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you’re not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.
However.
I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it’s reasonable for those other people to say “I am willing to buy you food, but I don’t want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision.” That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn’t.
I think that there’s a qualitative difference between saying “I don’t want to pay to buy someone else alcohol” and “I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they’ve bought themselves.”
I mean, sure. But we were talking about disabled people, and disabled people possibly can’t buy anything for themselves for reasons out of their control. You’re essentially imposing a different standard of life on them just based on that.
And maybe that’s not wrong - you’re not the only one that takes this stance - but it does deserve pointing out.
(And with, like, porn it doesn’t even apply. That’s mostly for free)
Nope. Don’t start putting caveats on aid.
You can’t buy comforts. You will live the life i think you should be accustomed to. It’s infantilising and controlling
It’s more like - I’ll help with the necessities to keep you alive. Anything extra is on you. We all have our vices but why should I pay for yours
How much of your income do you want to give to buy alcohol for strangers? Would you donate a large amount of your money to an aid fund that spent 10%? 50%? 80%? on booze? What about meth? Guns? Nazi memorabilia? What it’s only 5% on Nazi stuff, 95% on food?
I’m being a dick but they have a fair point in why people put caveats on aid. I’m a fan of UBI to some degree personally, because I think people as a rule should be trusted with making their own decisions, but I do like choosing where the value of labor goes too.
You might personally think it sucks, but it’s how it rolls. I live in a country where social system payments are straight up monetary amounts. If you are eligible to receive aid, you receive it. How you manage your affairs is none of the government’s business .
There are caveats, such as the income management system, but for the most part that’s actually opt-in and they’re reviewing junking the entire concept as it was originally introduced very very badly by an administration that attempted to leverage vulnerable groups
My taxpayer dollars go to support people doing their peopley things as they choose, as adults. And I’m actually ok with that. It’s a safety net, not a leash. Poverty isn’t a moral position
I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn’t be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.
It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.
If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say “I’m fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don’t want to pay for alcohol”? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.
If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.
I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.
How are you distinguishing:
- it’s ok to treat all men as criminals who may attack women and women as victims who may be attacked so we need to keep them from fraternizing
From
- it’s not ok to try to reduce their self-destructive behaviors that are keeping them from being able to support themselves
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high. I don’t know how to manage this best but it seems likely that at least some of the situations of abuse would be helped by having spaces without men in them. Does that mean we should force men and women apart? No. But how to manage that I will concede is a difficult problem.
In many cases of abuse the abuser keeps the victim close and prevents any outside contact as much as possible. Having the moment without the abuser nearby can provide an opportunity to escape which seems to provide some significant utility. On the other hand someone who is supported by their partner and actually does derive benefit from that would suffer from the separation, not to mention the suffering of the men who would theoretically be separated from their partners and kids.
I don’t have the answer, but I do see it as fundamentally different from the self destructive behaviour situation. Someone who is disabled is no less able to make bad choices. If I could be a tradie, say an electrician, and I can go to the pub after work and smoke a pack of cigarettes then the same should apply to a disabled person. Is it the best decision? No. But it is theirs.
In the same way an abused partner should be able to make the decision to stay in the abusive relationship, whether that be a good or had choice. That said, paths out from abusive relationships and from smoking should both be made available as much as is reasonably possible.
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high.
No. Higher than the other direction but hardly extreme
Statistically speaking the harm from drug adficts and alcohol is is much higher
