"Most people are not autodidacts because most people have no material reason to learn a specific topic (i.e. their job does not require it) and the problem with learning for the sake of learning is opportunity cost: there is no a priori reason to learn one thing over another, so better to do nothing and wait for something to appear which actually grabs your interest. Again, this is likely rational! Could you imagine if you found everything interesting? You’d spend years living in a basement curating a wiki of late Soviet military hardware or something."
10GBase-T can still be nice if you're going to do native PoE (which the author did not) or you expect a mix of devices with 1/2.5/5 which you don't want to or can't upgrade/replace immediately (which is where it sounds like the author was situated).
The new 10GBASE-T SFPs are actually not too bad - you can get the full 100 meters at half the wattage it takes for the old space heater generation ones to reach 30 meters. Based on the article, the author did not know there were newer cooler options for the ~the same price.
Go ahead and require a special gadget to get an "electronically transferrable ticket," no skin off my back. That is a feature I will never use.
Don't bother your season ticket holders about getting their own person admitted! I am standing in front of you, bearing identification, and you are whining about a mobile app?
Forgery is a non-issue -- this guy is a season ticket holder. Literally all they need is his government ID checked against a list.
The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution
But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?
Most early stage companies are now doing the same thing as well. It's basically a re-invention of the "build fast and test" model that was the norm amongst startups in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Yes it led to some degree of tech debt, but it also made it easier to experiment, validate, and identify good and bad workflows.
At least in my network, we don't think AI will replace all workers and we strongly believe AI will lead to a significant amount of tech debt, but we do also recognize a lot of work in tech today is busywork and will be automated away in the hands of actual engineers with domain expertise.
How is it nonsense? Vision doesn't matter - customer feedback matters.
You start off with a hypothesis (X will solve Y's problem by doing ...), you build a prototype, and then you start testing with multiple Ys. Based on that feedback, you then tweak your initial hypothesis or you scrap it and pivot.
The whole point of engineering is to build tools that solve a specific class of problems for the buyer.
Most people are not Steve Jobs, and do not have such a vision. Or the ability and capital to see such a thing through to the end. Steve Jobs also had a number of visions that didn't work out so well too - he learned and interated from them.
Thus, for most folks releasing a product and getting to market/revenue is more important than anything else. Then iterate from there.
YMMV of course. But the older I get, the more I realize "just get it done" is far more important than almost any other metric there is. There is a ton of navel gazing in tech that provides negative value. If I had released some of the things I worked on in the past vs. carefully designing and polishing them, I might still be working on them today. Competing products have maybe 50% of the "quality" of even my prototypes of 10 years ago - but they exist in the market and are used every day by customers to generate income.
An old coworker of mine got his first job out of school with IBM.
IBM hadn't done many layoffs ever at that point and apparently didn't have system for it. He showed up on layoff day and they laid everyone off with a very generous baseline layoff package, including substantial education benefits. So he just went back to school on their dime for several years ;)
Chaika was not a copy of a Packard. (They certainly admired the Packard bodywork, but Soviet industry was in no way ready to clone a Packard sedan)
Tu-144 was not a copy of the Concorde. (Convergent evolution is not the same as copying a design!)
The Soviets did clone a lot of DEC gear but I don't think SM-1, specifically, was a DEC clone. (In this lastmost case, the Soviets were left cloning computer equipment because it was forbidden to export to COMECON states)
Sorry, SM-4 not SM-1, was a full emulation of 11/40, with UNIBUS, and all. There were DEC copyright strings latent in some system files. It was a pretty good copy, but quite unreliable, and the reason was quite pedestrian---the connectors! It was a good lesson on how the entire technology chain needs to be high quality for the final product to work well.
Another example I forgot: the first Soviet nuke was directly copied from the stolen Fat Man design. Of course later they did novel stuff, especially the fusion designs of Sacharov et al.
It is well known that KGB got hold of the Concorde blueprints, so yeah, not a direct copy but certainly a lot of influence in that design. Again. the details like engine performance made the difference: apparently Tu144 had to continuously use afterburners to stay supersonic. It was also quite unreliable---I've heard that towards its end of life it was just flying cargo and airmail.
The Concorde and the Tupolev both relied on afterburners, because they operated under similar design constraints -- the "western" jet engines in the Concorde were not that much better than what Soviet design bureaus could produce.
The Concorde was much smaller, and lacked one of the major innovations of the Tu-144 -- forward flap canards to improve handling on a larger jet.
Probably for the better. The Tupolev killed a lot of its passengers, and it was almost immediately withdrawn from service after the first few incidents. The Concorde, a simpler and smaller design, served for decades.
The Americans "hold my beer" and then later "you know what, fuck this". Classic example of bad choice, good choice. Overall the arguable made out the best with this. Boeing instead focus on 747 and commercial planes airlines actually wanted and damn near became a global monopoly.
This. It's fundamentally a social problem. The moment that reader mode becomes the default, they'll start gradually extending it with "useful" additions until it's just as bloated and painful again, and then we'll have some rebrand of the concept of reader mode, and the cycle starts anew.
"Why can't we have a functional version of the site for the blind, and the normal one for everyone else?"
Sure, but that's a big if: "Oh, just this one small thing for interactivity would be nice ... and this other thing ..." just like with how the early web expanded functionality.
uhoh
i've been spotted
reply