rShergold

We’ve had our Miele dishwasher for 5 years. Running on average 1.5 times a day. It’s flawless.

Here in the UK the customer service has been amazing. The company we bought from (AO.com) installed it incorrectly (the water pipe plug wasn’t removed) they told us to get stuffed. We called Miele. They sent someone to us the next day and fixed it free of charge

Back in the early 2000s lots of websites had an unauthenticated "guestbook" feature where visitors could leave a message. As soon as Google and page rank became a thing bots would drive by and leave links to the website they were promoting. The idea was to increase the number of backlinks and thus improve your Google rank.

The fix to this was shockingly simple. Add an input box with a standard name like "title" and then hide it with CSS. The bots would always provide a value for every input. If you saw a value for your hidden input you returned 200 but never added the post to your website.

I’ve had to deal with this a few times now. After asking around the greybeards I really respect this is my current run book.

First: Talk to them about it. This is the hardest part. The aim of this conversation is to let them know you’ve noticed a change in performance and you want to know what you can do to help. It’s an open conversation but there are two possible outcomes.

1. They’re bored of their work. This is more common than you think. Give them a big problem. Maybe a bug no one can figure out. Maybe move them to a different project for a while. Check in with them every day/2 days. They don’t have to solve/finish it instantly but they do have to demonstrate engagement.

2. They’re burnt out. This is coming for all of us one day so be kind. The solution to burnout is give them micro tasks. If there are no micro tasks take an existing task and break it down into micro tasks. Something that would take you an hour to do. You want to get them into the habit of moving tickets across the board again. There’s no time pressure here but you do want to start tracking their productivity.

If you suspect they are slacking off/have problems at home/have a full time second job solution 2 also applies.

Think of this period as like hiring an intern/junior developer. Your job is to support them & build them up. If they were once productive you’re trying to get that guy back. This takes time and don’t rush it.

Keep a close eye on their velocity. Expect them to be slowly building up. If you use ticket points track their points.

If after the first 2 weeks you get the feeling they are not engaging now is the time to notify your manager/ HR (depending on your country firing someone may be a long process)

The aim is to get them back to being productive again. Whatever caused this issue. don’t expect to get them back for 2-3 months. This is okay remember how much it costs in time and money to get in a replacement.

What we want to see over that time is a gradual improvement in velocity. Slowly start giving larger tasks. Check in with them at standup every day and have a half hour call with them once/twice a week.

Over these 2/3 months if you see no improvement bring in HR and initiate a formal PIP or whatever process you have for firing someone. If they’re taking the piss they’ve been found out. If they’re burnt out and are not engaging with this process maybe their time as a software developer has come to an end. At the very least their time at your company has.

Every single person is different. One person I took though the process fully embraced it and has since been promoted. Turns out he just needed more responsibility.

This seems like a neat little service.

Just a heads up. Here in the UK Peng is slang for sexually attractive.

How does Docalysis.com work? I'm presuming you take the user input then search the documents for matching words to get snippets then add the snippets to a prompt (along with the original query) you send to an LLM.

What does the cost look like? Are you running your own llama.cpp or just using the ChatGPT API?

Harvard was created to educate the elite not to create it. This is the fundamental issue here.

These institutions see their purpose as preserving western civilisation and hopefully shaping its future direction. Part of this joke was about turning Harvard into a trade school for asian doctors. From their point of view this would be the same as becoming a factory churning out plumbers or electricians.

The "secret sauce" of the admissions process is simply "If this candidate doesn't attend Harvard are they highly likely to become a member of the elite anyway?". This opens up things about our society we don't want to face. George Bush is related to the late Queen of England. Many of the elite are the same families who have ruled over us for the last thousand years.

Even at the local level your chance at becoming an important person in your city is closely related to who your parents are.

By accounting for the structure of society and distribution of power at the time of application the admissions process becomes at best conservative and at worst racist.

Eric Gill the creator of the Gill Sans font was extremely deviant. His artwork is iconic and from what I can tell not deviant.

On a long enough timeline the natural value of land tends towards infinity.

If a corporate entity can take out a 1,000 year loan it can make a profit buying a single home for one billion dollars.

This is why the economic models created to understand supply and demand for manufacturing pins in a factory eventually unravel when discussing land.

My fundamental problem with email is all the robots.

I need a tool that sorts all my email into two boxes. "Robots" and "Humans".

Further I want repeated notifications about a message if: - It comes from a human - It was sent only to me - I have previously emailed this person

In [current year] my email account is like my post box on my home. I need it because I get important documents sent to me by robots (bills) but it just piles up until I know there is something in there that I need.

If a human were to send me a letter it would easily get lost.

Every email productivity tool targets the market of people who use email a lot. For most of us direct messaging has replaced email. However when an actual human does email us it tends to be very important. Something we don't want to miss. There is no tool I know of to solve this.

That's an excellent phrase. It reminds me of the navy saying "regulations are written in blood"

I agree with a lot of what you're saying.

However if the threshold for not including a package is that it's 8 lines of code that would rule out using most of the functions in Lodash and Underscore.

If the threshold is not importing code a child could write that would rule out using Babel which was in fact literally written by a child.

yeah it's called Tree Shaking. It's been a massive area of improvement over the last few years. However JavaScript being dynamic can be very difficult to effectively statically analyse.

A good example: There is a library called Moment for handling dates. Due to the way the interface was built it basically can't be tree shaken. It's an excellent library but it's on the heavy side. For a while now people have been moving to libraries like Date-Fns which are collections of individual functions. This library can be tree shaken as it's obvious which functions you are using and which you are not

It seems to be really common to sling mud at the JavaScript/NPM ecosystem from developers who work in other domains.

One of the big constraints we have in front end development is that every added feature adds to the bundle size of code we have to send down the wire to the end user.

When I worked in mobile app development third party libraries tended to be very large with many many features. Only a tiny fraction of that library ends up matching your use case. However when you build you end up bundling up the whole thing into your app.

JavaScript has more of a culture of many many small hyper focused packages. The logical conclusion being single function packages like left pad.

This has two benefits. One - you have less dead code in your final build. Two - if one of your dependencies is already using leftpad you essentially get to use it "for free".

If everyone did what you are suggesting you would find multiple instances of leftpad. One version you wrote. One version your dependency wrote. One version your dependency's dependency wrote etc.

I would presume the ideal super weapon would be a lethal airborne virus that only you had the vaccination for. It would decimate your enemy but leave all their infrastructure intact.

It wouldn't be too expensive to achieve. You would just need to find an existing virus and conduct gain of function research to make it more transmissible and more lethal.