Recent submissions

Comment · 11 months ago
Yes, I think when you work in implementation, it's obvious that you made a bad decision (to yourself before others see it) and you are quick to say "I made a mistake, let's fix it before the mess gets worse". Your skillset in this hypothetical I'm creating is "implementation". You decided on the implementation but that's only part of the entire thing you are responsible for (plan, build, maintain).

For execs they are responsible for monitoring key indicators and deciding on what to do.

When things go wrong it could be they weren't monitoring the right things and missed it or the direction the took initially was wrong (either right away or as things changed and they didn't see it).

That's their entire job, more or less. Not trivializing it. The stakes are high pretty often.

Comment · 11 months ago
Ice forms on the roof and they need to get up there manually and clear it off and I don't think they do. :)

I was driving the Gaspe coastal road once after an ice storm and we were on the road with a bunch of semis early in the morning. The switchbacks had massive sheets of ice coming off them over the sides. It was wild.

It wasn't so thick that driving over the shattered pieces was an issue but it was a sight to behold and turned a white knuckle drive into a real jaw clencher.

Was there for a family issue and had to be somewhere otherwise I wouldn't have been on the road that day at all, let alone first thing.

Comment · 1 year ago
I once spent a couple hours debugging a perl cgi script. Nothing worked. Called in my colleague. Looks fine. We both were tearing our hair out. Sent it to the line printer, ordered pizza, and one of us read the code while the other typed it in. Couple hours later we finished and it worked.
Comment · 1 year ago
Um, ok. I think he's still doing ok and his fellow academics would prefer he didn't openly speculate about pet theories. They think it is embarrassing.

But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.

There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?

Comment · 1 year ago
No, he's the new "we should consider what this would look like if it were an artifact of an alien civilization" guy. You know, open minded.

He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet.

If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.

Comment · 1 year ago
I go for "I can understand experts, but not add much to the conversation" as a benchmark for knowing enough to participate in discussions at work. Then I use that "I can solve my immediate problem" method going forward.
Comment · 1 year ago
I was sitting with my dog in my yard one night and a green meteor lit up the evening sky like the day. It also made a sizzling noise (or maybe crackling).

I found out that the green was probably nickle content and the sizzling sounds also has an explanation which I don't recall.

What amazed me was that until I understood what I saw was a natural phenomenon, it seemed absolutely mind blowing and still stands out as one of the coolest things I've experienced yet no one I talked to saw it, there was no mention of it on the city subreddit, etc.

This was before the age of everyone having dashcams and doorbell cameras but something that remarkable happening over a densely populated suburban area at around 9pm not even being noticed by a single person I knew or was in contact with on socials suprised me.

Comment · 1 year ago
I am tired of people mocking me for my interest in this topic so I won't bother to back this up too much, but this article doesn't really do what you say. It is itself disinfo designed to provide a simple, easily digested explanation for people that don't wish to think too deeply on this topic.

Anyone taking a cursory interest knows that the US government routinely sends out disinfo on the subject and uses it to cover up their own secret aerospace development. That was never contentious.

However, sightings and reports of strange phenomenon go back very far in recorded and oral history and they are not limited to the United States.

My personal feeling is people are terrible eye witnesses and historical sources are prone to be misinterpreted through a biased, modern lens. But I also know that if you read the Wikipedia article on von Neumann probes, it doesn't seem that far fetched to think one might have found its way here especially considering we are not that far away from being able to build them ourselves.

Comment · 1 year ago
Many can accept forwarded emails and some will offer an email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters. I prefer the former because you can cancel the forward rule if you don't want to continue with a given rss app or service.
Comment · 1 year ago
When I was in cooking school, it was assumed we would not have the time or equipment to constantly be monitoring temps with a thermometer so we had techniques for determining fairly precisely the temp of things.

Poaching liquid was evaluated based on the quantity and rate of bubbles rising from the bottom of the pan.

Milk was scalded (e.g. for bechemel) when the milk foamed but was shut off before it boiled over.

A knife inserted in a steak, chop, or roast could be tested for temp against your lower lip or wrist (yes, yes, hygiene and so forth).

The techniques you are talking about all came about because of all understanding of food that led to science asking "why does cheese happen the way it does". The precise techniques leading to a sharp, hard cheese or a soft, fresh cheese were well understood long before instant read thermometers.

Comment · 1 year ago
I tend to agree here. I haven't been allowed to code for a few years now but I spend a lot of my time talking through code with developers. I find many of the people on my teams lack a perspective I can provide to frame a problem or evaluate an approach.

I also help them get to the heart of problems quickly simply because I'm not stuck in the code all day. For example, if I see a developer taking too long to identify the source of a bug, I'll get on a call and get them to take me through that code and get them prove any assumption ("ok, show me the code that checks that value is greater than zero").

By doing this I'm using my coding experience directly without actually coding. I'd consider coding a huge waste of time for me, but spending 30 minutes to unstick a developer when I am sure they should have found the problem by now seems like a really good use of my time.

It also lets people know they can't just spend three days on something that should take a couple hours without someone checking in, which I don't live having to do but it's a reality for some teams I work with.

Comment · 1 year ago
Did he say it was definitely a starship?
Comment · 1 year ago
Did he conclude it was a starship or argue we shouldn't dismiss out of hand that an object like this has a non-zero chance of being an artifact of another civilization?
Comment · 1 year ago
I spent a very frustrating 20 minutes with someone this week (a nice person I like, which is why I spent this time) explaining that the Python code chatgpt had provided them would just copy files from one folder to another and was no different from using Windows drag and drop copy.

It would not do any of the things they thought (lots of parsing and file renaming that it took a while for them to articulate). We also discussed how the corporate IT would not be installing a Python interpreter on their computer. Oh what's that? Let me explain. And so on.

ChatGPT didn't help, in this situation, as it turned out.

Comment · 1 year ago
I recently deleted my Reddit account after a million years because every other post was obviously AI generated "am I the jerk" posts (use your imagination for variations on "jerk").

I used to participate in some subreddits where support is offered for a couple of chronic illnesses I have but even those are "doctor says it's X, am I cooked".

Just over it.

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