OneEyedRobot

I'll pitch in my own two cents.

In the worlds I've worked in it would help a lot for every engineer to do a stint at a customer site. The bigger places I've worked for could have easily placed people with a customer for a while.

It's remarkable how much stuff is designed by people who don't use it for a living, will never use it for a living.

As someone with a similar time in harness in industries that rhyme with that, I feel your pain.

While I'd prefer to work, not needing the money implies the ability to avoid the interview process. It's a funny thing being in an industry where people retire not because they can't do the work at a professional level, but because getting a job is such a PITA.

Very cool. A person can really appreciate simple web design looking at something like Luke Smith's recipe page.

So how on earth do you take an idea like this and scale it for both broad web coverage and high traffic? For that matter, just how much 'useful' text is there on the net?

That's a shame since I think that Youtube can be really amazing.

My main (practically only) use for it is to watch amateur-produced special interest shows that are done on a regular basis. Usually it seems to involve automotive bodywork or subsurface mining with the occasional computer show.

The channels that move to having sponsors or getting a lot of free stuff are for the high jump (although it's absolutely a riot to watch Heather Heying shill for some sofa company, hating life all the while). I think the best ones are done by pure hobbyists.

Otherwise my current plan is to build a library of worthwhile videos via youtube-dl and DVD transfers. My guess is that the ad environment and much heavier copyright policing on youtube will make much of it unwatchable over time.

Looking at the US Constitution, IP law should be designed to heavily encourage innovation. I would think that the actual details of law would reflect that rather than maximizing the value of an idea to it's owner.

To be fair, the current results should have been predictable. A small, finely focused and self-interested group can usually defeat an unruly mass.

>I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and not bits :)

Good for you. My own bias and personal experience highly tends towards that, including US manufacture. Thinking about the article at the top, I wonder sometimes what the 'economy' even is anymore. I tend to distrust articles on it as all the news tends to involve internet-based FIRE 'industries' and surveillance marketing startups. I'm not feeling the love for those segments.

I wonder how you tell illegal optimizing for a test vs. legal optimizing for a test.

Lord knows what sort of magic they stick into 'Energy Star' appliances.

>These questions are always asked in bad faith,

I'd say not. I'd genuinely like to know if a cloth bandana has any value, if grocery stores are dangerous, is the mass of people actually better off for an early and hard vaccine regime. It's partly intellectual interest and partly an attempt to guide my own behavior.

Having said that, everyone is too invested in their theories to be skeptical.

I think that news has extended quite far into op-ed space. There's a combination of just what news is reported and just how a thing is worded.

Modern newspapers and news magazines (they still exist?) don't read at all like the ones from 50 years ago.

>FB is what my racist parents use

It looks to me like you've got bigger fish to fry than Facebook. It's probably time to give your parents a break.

I did it for three decades (3.5?) and the only code reviews were with friends of mine who worked at multiple companies together. The whole point of the review was to find outright errors, not to optimize. Scarcely any ego involvement.

It worked out fine I think and, mind you, it used to be a lot harder to push out a fix. A lot harder.

>Which is another argument for scrapping the opinion section of every newspaper, it confuses people.

At this point, I'd say that that's the entire newspaper. They operate in the same ad space as Facebook.

>the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation.

I can see that working both ways. The anti-vax folks are never going to believe the 'get vaccinated or you'll die' sort of rhetoric. Better to use real numbers. There's been enough time and cases to make good estimates.

Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?

There's a shroud of mystery throughout this situation with a need by some people to simply shout down to the masses. None of this is that complicated and medical leadership is some mixture of secretive and incompetent, and I'm not sure what the strongest tendency is.

I'd love to talk to the folks that work at the outrage porn outlets. Are they true believers doing whatever it takes? Actually think they print news? Just in it for the money?

How honed is the writing and how is that done? How do advertisers (the point of the exercise after all) respond? How has it all changed over time? How do people become writers, how much of it is done programatically?

It's a small thing, but something I'm struck by is how little international news is out there anymore.

>a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app.

So much for the Polish Cipher Bureau. Not so many tragic hero opportunities there.