teledyn

Put simply: HR.

For starters, the acronym means "Human RESOURCES" ie, square one, or is about resource extraction, like any mining operation, about exploiting that resource for maximum value at minimum cost, and externalize costs where ever possible.

Alernatively, when actually creative people need assistants, they INSPIRE collaborations, using only the value of their idea.

There's more money in the former than the latter, but as Henry Ford said, "you can make money or you can make sense, the two are mutually exclusive."

Beer!

Are senior management also taking past cuts?

There is the Theory of Everything and we're nearly certain it exists, we're really really close, we can smell it. Until then, we have two not so simple almost rules, quantum chromo-du-jour and pesky relativity. That's just my opinion of course. Who knows, it could be cymatic patterns carving analog ai onto the nerve cell surface, or a schoolmaster with a wooden pointer.

"When I'm not working, I sometimes think I know something. When I am working I realize I don't" - John Cage

Programming is not a hard science, it isn't a bunch of Engineering tables, there is no equation that returns an app. Donald Knuth said it then, and it is just as true today, Programming is an ART. You have techniques, usually they mean nothing, or need real massaging, you have experience, but the conditions have changed, you have a reputation, but you don't 'paint' like that anymore.

and those tests HR hands out. Man, don't make me laugh. You want to be a journalist? Ok, let's test your typing speed, oh, fine, ok, you're hired. It is not only madness, but I suspect it is a contributing factor to the horrors my industry has unleashed over the past 50 years. My teachers didn't call themselves "computer engineers" unless they built chips, no one said "software engineer" except maybe NASA; I think we could do better as computer /scientists/ but industry doesn't /do/ science, there's no money in it.

#end of curmudgeon rant

what you have is the ability to see the problem to be solved, the facilities and resources that may be available, maybe not, and a mind that folds, and sifts, and tucks and whittles and reforms that chaos into something no one has ever seen before, nor will see again (competitors legally can't replicate your experiment!) and that, I would say, defines a software program more than it describes yet another condominium or suspension bridge clone.

So, now, what is it about the reality of the situation that makes you think you suck at it? Right: EVERYTHING. We /all/ suck at it, every last one of us to the end of our days, because it is like music, or painting, or writing plays, no matter how many times you try, it always falls just a little short, and somewhere, painfully known to you, someone else does that bit a bit better. John Coltrane admired John Gilmore of the Sun Ra Arkestra, he said, "John has it."

That feeling is not going to go away, sorry.

So ... what needs doing now?

"When deciding by committee Here's a useful rule of thumb: Talents make a difference, And follies make a sum!"

- Piet Hein, "Grooks"

I still use an rss reader, mostly for journals. As The Platforms took over, many notification services like city council, weather, road conditions, even school bus cancelations feed into these, and over time my opml file got smaller and smaller.

Having rss in emacs gnus works for me, but for wide use, it needs to be browser based, one click, you don't even need to know it is rss (but maybe a toggle for full text vs blurb) which is what I get with Flym on android. Flym can also detect if a page has the link metadata, but you have to copy paste the url into it.

RSS can be relayed into mastodon, but this requires a hosting an app, so it might as well just be an app.

For the new bloggers, it's like including semantic web structured data, it is something a writer should never need to know, at most an option button in their composing software, clicked, done!

In Europe we did call the music of that time "Beat Music", in germany we had many pop music tv shows that were Beat this and Beat that (using the English word)

I met Rod Davis in 2016, I should have asked him, but I always assumed they were named after their style of music.

A thank you to those who posted tips, although I do wonder how we are expected to know this! How did you all find out?

I do find these things go out of their way to /not/ offer what Buxton called a "self-revealing interface"; most of the apps I use don't even have a basic help page or even a legend for special symbols on their display!

Maybe it really /is/ a generational thing. I recall being similarly amazed when my gradeschool son demonstrated (matter of factly) the 'hidden' chambers full of coin in Commander Keen, like jumping in a tunnel because, you never know, the ceiling might be an illusion, and kids think the character's cringe and bleep of hitting a hard ceiling is funny. They were priming my kids...

"I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone."

- Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++

I bought a state of the art Timex Sinclair, "fully loaded". My neighbour, an investments dealer for a major bank, saw it and asked, "Could it do financial equations?"

Next day, armed with our strip of silver paper, we met with the head of Domestic Investments...

google Fediverse