This is my general experience with IT. In a small company they are genuinely there to help you get your work done.
In a big company the relationship becomes adversarial. They're no longer there to help people get work done, they exist to prevent the company from the most incompetent employees.
My general experience with Cherry style mechanical key switches is disappointment. In my almost 40 years of computing they are the only type of key switch that have consistently given me issue. I've owned at least five boards at this point with them, and they all eventually have issues.
They're like owning a sports car, you have to get used to opening them up and cleaning the contacts, desoldering switches, oiling stems. They're just too high maintenance.
I gave that life up when the P key stopped working on my WhiteFox mid outage and I had to frantically switch keyboards.
My daily driver for the last five years has been a rubber dome Sun Type 7. It has given me zero problems, no one complains about the noise, it's got that so ugly it's cool "retro chic" thing going even though I bought it new direct from Oracle.
I still have multiple IBM buckling spring boards from when I was a kid and none of them have ever given me an issue.
That's pretty interesting. My first mechanical keyboard (Logitech G710+ with genuine Cherry Brown switches) withstood daily bashing of 7+ years, and it still types like the first day. Considering I wrote a Ph.D. on that incl. code and manuscript, it has been used relatively heavily, mixed with some gaming.
I have two other 75% mechanical keyboards, but they are not used as much, and I can't give any feedback on their longevity, but high quality switches do endure from my experience.
On the other hand, I had quite a few top of the line Microsoft keyboards, which were built very well, but their stems wear down after some time, even though their membranes survive. They become a workout instead of being a work enabler, then they are given away.
I have a Claude code set up in a folder with instructions on how to access iMessage. Ask it questions like “What did my wife say I should do next Friday?”
Reads the SQLite db and shit. So burn your tokens on that.
That sucks, but honestly I’d get out of there as fast as possible. Life is too short to live under unfulfilling work conditions for any extended amount of time.
It's not hard to burn tokens on random bullshit (see moltbook). If you really can deliver results at full speed without AI, it shouldn't be hard to keep cover.
The new Alexa is always cracking jokes about things I ask her. Sometimes pretty complex or off the wall jokes. They're rarely funny but usually competent, unlike other AIs in my experience. I wonder how much work went into that.
That said, I absolutely hate it. I want the tersest response possible from you, wiretap. I don't have time for your sass.
Let's say in theory the TSA is doing their job and verifying there is nothing dangerous on the plane, it would seem to me then anyone should be allowed to fly. I don't see what we're supposed to even be achieving beyond a warrantless harassment campaign against people the government decides it doesn't like?
> process has an unfortunate side effect of crushing innovation unintentionally
We've been taken over by PE and forced into a very strict Jira powered "Agile" with time tracking of how long cards are in progress, and all work needs to be planned pre-sprint.
I cannot even begin to explain the opportunity cost of all this to anyone with any sort of control. The art of building good software is continual improvement. Being able to improve something without planning it.
> Being able to improve something without planning it.
There are very few professions we’d consider this acceptable. Implicit in this statement is the assumption that your time-value is only known by you (or free).
You certainly wouldn’t let your contractor improve things on your dime, unplanned, and unexplained. You might even fire them if you discovered they spent the day “refactoring” conduit instead of installing the pot lights you asked them for.
> You certainly wouldn’t let your contractor improve things on your dime
Where you have a contractor hired on a full-time basis with the intent to built the best house, or at least the most moated house, on the market so that all the people of the world come to live in your house, not someone else's, of course you would.
Your example worsens your position. I do not want my home builder going over budget and over time without telling me, only finding out after their “continual improvement” that I won’t be moving into my house. Worse, because they believe only they’re able to know what’s best.
In your fictional scenario of unlimited budget and time, sure I grant that an expert should work unguided.
> Worse, because they believe only they’re able to know what’s best.
Well, you certainly wouldn't hire a contractor if you knew better, would you? That would be pointless. The whole reason for hiring a contractor, instead of hiring the same laborers the contractor will go on to hire on you behalf anyway, is because the contractor brings the expertise you lack. If you can't trust them to know better than you, why bother? It just becomes an unnecessary expense and a waste of another person's time.
In practice what you’re suggesting is that you’ll let your home builder run over time and over budget. Intervention on your behalf would be an unnecessary expense and a waste of the builders time. They know better and that would be pointless.
Your position is employers are building the best house with the biggest moat to attract the entire world, with an assumed endless time and budget, and there are no bounds to be set with employees.
> you’re suggesting is that you’ll let your home builder run over time and over budget.
If you thought your home builder was going to run over time and budget, you wouldn't hire him in the first place. Those who can't find the necessary trust don't build homes. There are plenty of used homes out there to buy.
There will always be this back-and-forth discussion of planning vs not-planning. The agile idea in itself is quite simple: Inspect and Adapt. My firm belief is that everything else needs to be build around that.
> The agile idea in itself is quite simple: Inspect and Adapt.
Ish. Agile is, ultimately, about removing managers.
- Individuals over processes
- Working software over documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Developers on a team coming together to inspect and adapt, as you say, is a necessary function when you don't have a manager to do it for you. Hence why it is included in the Twelve Principles. Each of the twelve principles present a function that needs to be considered when you don't have a manager to do the work for you.
Of course, this point from the Twelve Principles is always Agile's sticking point: "Build projects around motivated individuals." In the real world, businesses don't want to hire motivated individuals that will drive projects, they want to hire many cheap, replaceable commodities along with just one motivated manager to whip them into shape. That is what that Jira stuff mentioned in the earlier comment is all about.
My friend was going through a pretty massive depression after his mom passed. He'd been with my wife and I at our house for a number of hours talking through it, and apparently not texting his sisters back. They called in a welfare check.
We live in a reasonably dense suburb. Police showed up at our front door and asked to speak with him. They just wanted to make sure he was doing OK. He asked them "how did you find me?" and their response was just "we pinged your phone".
Watching my security camera, they did not stop at any of my neighbors houses first. It was very direct to my front door. This leads me to believe whatever sort of coordinates they had were pretty spot on. His car was parked well down the block and not in front of our house so that was no give away.
This was five years ago and always struck me as a "Huh"
Oh! So IIRC it used to be that the modem could only get a rough estimate of your location and typically Apple/Google's location infra(which combined wifi/blue and lately satellite position based shadow mapping) to determine a precise location. And law enforcement got precise info from _that_ infra(E911 requirements for every device).
Clearly they don't need that now because 5g cell towers have gotten precise enough? Also, if that's true then 5g being that precise might still not apply to urban dense areas, where more postprocessing is required to get better location accuracy...
5G isn’t inherently any more precise, but because of the higher frequency used in 5G, the radio signals are blocked by obstructions much more easily, so there must be many more 5G radios per unit area to provide coverage. And one feature of having many more base stations around is that triangulation of specific phone is much more accurate and precise because of how close the 5G base stations are to all 5G phones.
5G infrastructure isn’t limited to tall easily visible radio towers like 4G and before; 5G transmitters are small and relatively inexpensive, making them very common. My employer has a private 5G infrastructure, and we are not related to telecommunications in any way.
For the most part they use the same or lower frequencies. N71 (600mhz) is lower than any of the 2G/3G bands and requires less cell density than 3G (UMTS/WCDMA) did.
> 5G infrastructure isn’t limited to tall easily visible radio towers like 4G and before;
Nor were earlier technologies. DAS systems get used in large buildings/cities and were done with 4G as well. Small cells and femtocells have been a thing since at least 3G era.
> 5G transmitters are small and relatively inexpensive, making them very common.
Transmitter cost wasn't the primary limitation before, the options for unlicensed/lightly-licensed spectrum were low before and the standards weren't really designed to use them as primary carrier until NR. Also you had to run way more components to run earlier technologies, the stack is just smaller for a NR deploy.
This is not true, 5G has multiple positioning improvements that are not related to higher frequencies. 5G has something called LMF (Location Management Function) that handles positioning of user clients through multiple means, like round trip time, angle of arrival, and dedicated 5G positioning reference signals.
i swore 5G used much higher frequencies (and is therefore blocked by so many more things that don't affect 4G and below.) I'm glad I'm wrong, thank you.
In 2009 I worked with a triangulation system in a dense populated area. The precision of location was comparable in average to GPS (meaning sometimes better) when indoors, it was orders of magnitude better as GPS. That was 3G, some yeras ago… I assume today is much better, as the density of cells increased
I'd be very interested in more info, but am going to doubt this for now. Usually just the intra-day deformations of the terrain between the towers through hydrological activity should far exceed what GNSS can achieve.
It is just VERY VERY hard to beat the predictability of orbits.
Do people under the age of sixty even use traditional social media anymore? Do we have actual stats?
I am in my late thirties so surely out of touch, but am friends with people in their mid twenties and frankly I don't know anyone who spends any significant time on anything other than TikTok. I guess you could call TikTok "social media", but it wouldn't fit my old person definition.
I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now. You don't even see your friend stuff. You just see slop. I use Facebook primarily for marketplace these days, but when I do scroll my feed, it's all like weird east asian AI slop. Women cutting open impossibly large fruit, fake tartar removal, fake videos of fights.
Literally nothing that compels me to stay on the site like I hear people on here talk about.
reply