Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
Don’t cost-optimize people’s homes. Just don’t.
The amount of times I’ve gone to a maintenance job with a description “people are cold”, only to see a plaque on the wall stating that this building has been optimized by Company X is actually infuriating.
And the worst thing is that they inject their proprietary, remote control system on top of the original automation. This means that I can’t change anything without literally reprogramming the entire site.
So I’m standing there, trying to figure out how to tell an 80yo lady “you’re cold because the building managers want to save some money” without going on an anti-capitalist rant. This has had a success rate of around 30%.
I do ameuter music production, one hill I will die on is there is no right way to mix a track of music it is entirely subjective and mixing a track of music is way more creative of a practice then some faceious salesman make it out online
Ebikes are motorbikes, not bycicles.
Not saying they aren’t fun or useful at times, but they shouldn’t be treated as a bicycles.
I don’t care if the motor engages using a button, twist grip, your feet or twitching your nose, it is a motor and exceeds your natural body power.
give me a job or im dead how about that hill
un(der)employed solidarity :(
Modern PLCs are indistinguishable from IPCs with an RTOS and there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to use a proper language for them - with a stdlib and external library support. But manufacturers defined the term and have the industry hostage so you have to buy semi functional libraries and can’t use git, unit testing or other automation.
But they’re not Real Time
Well they’re more stable and predictable than software running on a regular OS, at least, however you want to call it.
Do not power law fit your process data for predictive models. No. Stop. Put the keyboard down. Your model will almost certainly fail to extrapolate beyond the training range. Instead, think for at least two seconds about the chemistry and the process, maybe review your kinetics textbook, and only then may you fit to a physics-based model for which you will determine proper statistical significance. Poor fit? Too bad, revise your assumptions or reconsider whether your “data” are really just noise.
Always run qNMR with an internal standard if you are using it to determine purity. And, as a corollary, do not ignore unidentified peaks. Yes, even if it “has always been that way”.
DOE models almost certainly tell you less than you think they do, especially when cross-terms are involved, or when the effects are categorical, or when running a fractional factorial design…
Maybe not technical, but teaching is weird.
If people aren’t having fun/engaged they’re not learning much. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. It’s so frustrating to come across someone who writes the standards you’re supposed to follow and they are the most boring and fake teacher you’ve experienced.
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.
Hear hear. My job’s about to force RTO starting January. Precious few other engineering jobs offer WFH to non-SW engineers.
RTO mandates are employees reduction schemes, nothing more.
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.
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.
Windows 7 is a great example.
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.
I usually take these holiday weeks off to learn a new language or framework, and started to take a peek into Python, I had it on the back burner way too long. Got to the dynamic variable types and my heart sunk… I couldn’t continue.
Maybe I should take a third attempt at Rust.
Honestly modern python is not that bad because of the typing hints and checks you can run on them nowadays. Also it’s worth noting that python has very strong types, so it’s not illy willy magical types, and while it is possible to use it like that it’s normally not encouraged (unlike other languages).
That being said, if you haven’t learnt Rust I strongly encourage you to read the book and go through the rustling exercises. Honestly while still a new and relatively nieche language, it fixes so many of the issues that exist in other languages that I think it will slowly take over everything. Sure. It’s slower to write, but you avoid so much hassle on maintenance afterwards.
i hadn’t heard of the rustlings before. looks neat, might be what i need to finally learn rust properly
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?
From my perspective, dynamic typing IS type corrosion!
No it’s not, they’re completely different concepts. In C/C++ lingo Dynamic typing is having every variable be a
void *whereas type coercion is implementing conversion functions for your types to allow casting between types, e.g. having a temperature class that can be casted to a double (or from it).This is a function with dynamic typing and no type coercion in C/C++:
int foo(void* param) { Temperature* t = (Temperature*) param; return t->intValue() + 10; }This is the same function with type coercion and no dynamic typing in C/C++:
int foo(Temperature& t) { return t + 10; }I’m making a Star Wars joke based on a typo. I know what type coercion is. The joke is that dynamic typing is corroded and disgusting to me. The Star Wars reference being Anakin saying from his perspective the Jedi were evil.
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
Dyac
Its not possible to have objects that are statically typed.
What are you talking about? What do you think C/C++/Rust/Java do?
Wut
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.
I don’t let it wrote code per se but I’ve found it useful for writing regex for me to paste into notepad++ find/replace commands.
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.
I wish FPGAs and other more purpose built and purpose suited options were available in my IT equipment. They can do amazing shit, better and more efficiently. Just wasn’t ever available to use for me at least.
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’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
Usually it was a tradeoff with the voltage, but just checked and MLCC caps have quite high V limit! Long time I haven’t done any analog design but got a chuckle seeing that micro is still typed as lowercase “u” :)
mlccs can also be run right up to their voltage limits without needing a huge derating
for high frequency response the main determining factor is actually the package size!
I still call pf ‘puffs’
