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This is probably going to push me to completely close a couple of AWS accounts I setup when doing training courses so I could get certified (mandatory requirement from my work).

I'm not currently running anything and have no plans to at the moment. I've always had a mild dread that I'll suddenly get a bill for more than $0.00.

If AWS can goof in a way that causes obviously massive bills (like today), what's to say they can't goof in more subtle ways and start charging small additional amounts that many people may not notice and just pay it.

It's also so that rescue personnel can see into the plane in the event it crashes.

The AI tool providers need companies and customers to pay for the tools and automation. If all the white collar jobs in the Western world are replaced by AI or AI generated SAAS products, some 60% percent the workforce suddenly won't have jobs. If such a large percentage of the workforce has no income through employment, who will be able to pay for the services from SAAS providers and thus ultimately the AI providers?

The tradesmen working on my house renovations aren't consuming SAAS products during their day jobs.

The white collar workforce can't rapidly switch to blue collar jobs.

So for these companies to remain viable, they need the white collar workers to still somehow end up with enough money to pay for services that ultimately the companies provide.

Maybe the turning point will be a recognition that companies can't only focus on maximising shareholder value. They also need to consider their role in maintaining and improving the societies they operate in.

I work for a bank. There is a strategic focus on the mobile banking app over the web app. Younger generations are doing everything through their phones. Including applying for home loans. Many banks are moving towards being digital only as contactless payments means people are using cash a lot less to the point that physical bank branches don't make sense anymore.

As I teenager and then poor uni student, I rode a number of bikes or bike parts to failure.

I first snapped the top tube of a stell framed BMX near the stem after many years of using it for a local paper round with a milk crate roped onto the handlebars. The weight of the papers was certainly a contributing factor.

I've snapped a chain while out of the saddle, accelerating a road bike. Nothing too serious, just banged by knee on the bars. Still, do not recommend.

While riding up a long steep hill, I snapped the nut off the outside of a clipless pedal. Luckily the pedal didn't slip off the axle and I could get to a safe stopping point.

I had a carbon top tube delaminate from some aluminium lugs near the stem. Something felt off with the handling so I glanced down and could see ~1.5 cm of the lug showing. Decided to walk the bike the rest of the way to work that day. Got a local carbon repair specialist to re-bond it and it lasted a few more years.

That carbon frame eventually developed a crack in the bottom bracket and frame from front to back right next to the seat tube on the chain ring side. When it failed, the bike started feeling "noodly" to ride, so I looked down and saw the crack opening and closing as I pedaled along.

Somehow I snapped the rear suspension pivot in a Trek Y3 without realising it until the next time I went to ride it. I jumped on it to ride to uni and something felt off. Then I noticed the front and rear wheels were both tracking straight but significantly offset from each other. Took a while to get it repaired as it was a custom part.

When borrowing my brothers (pre-suspension era) MTB I tried a little jump up a kerb. The front fork folded in half. I bent it back straight enough to get sufficient wheel clearance to finish the ride (slowly).

I have buckled many rims over the years on BMX, MTB and road bikes. The early aluminium rims were expensive and really easy to buckle compared to steel rims.

Had the freewheel pawls fail in a rear cassette suddenly one day. They would catch once every few pedal rotations for maybe 1/3 of a rotation. Initially I thought I'd dropped the chain. It was a long walk home.

I was having trouble keep my front QR wheel on a road bike from vibrating mildly as I rode on it. I thought the bearing were loose, so I took the wheel off then found the hollow QR axle had snapped in the middle.

From riding with many others over the years, I'm also aware that larger (taller) riders can break stuff more easily as well. One work colleague who was probably 6'3-4" snapped a cog off the rear cassette almost perfectly in half while accelerating. He wasn't a strong rider, he'd started bike commuting a few months earlier. Maybe the crank length he needed brought extra torque.

Another very strong 6'1" guy I rode with for a few years cracked 3 carbon Bianchi frames within the first few months of owning them. All replaced under warranty. I think he was just heavier and stronger that the frames were generally designed for.

Frames are typically weakest at the joins as that is where the stress is concentrated.

Any rotating part will eventually wear and fail.

Ride a bike long and often enough and something _will_ give out.

The Book of Eli War of the Worlds 2012 Day of the Triffids (TV series) The Bodysnatchers Waterworld The Postman Contagion

I know this is a late response, but for anyone curious you would need to use an official Oracle or Sun JDK/JRE from Java 8 or older. OpenJDK doesn't include support for applets.

You also need a browser that has NPAPI. IE 11 was the most modern browser I am aware of that still supported applets.

The old GUI framework mentioned in the GP might have been Swing. It is still included in most JDKs and allows for cross platform desktop GUI application development with no other dependencies outside the JDK. Finding documentation on how to do GUIs in Swing is getting increasingly difficult though.

Using your restaurant example, if the restaurant closes it may not have much obvious effect on other nearby businesses. However, that restaurant would have given business to various food and consumables suppliers, to waste management companies, to an accountant etc. All those businesses have now lost a source of income and may be less profitable.

Perhaps the restaurant was leasing the premises from a landlord. The landlord may still have a loan for the business premises. That loan could be at risk of going into arrears if no other person decides to try their luck running a restaurant in a location that doesn't have sufficient patronage.

Consider now that the office workers who have refused to RTO work for the bank that holds the loan for the business premises. There is a risk to the bank now that the premises is less valuable because it can't be leased and is less attractive for a future purchaser.

The point is that most businesses don't operate without having other businesses as suppliers or clients. When one business does badly it can affect other businesses in their network. A small number of isolated businesses failing doesn't cause knock on effects. However, if a larger number of smaller retailers, dependent on foot traffic close in the same locality it will have a ripple effect out to many other larger businesses.

Business owners and executives have an interest in trying to maintain a healthy business network. Some will believe that pushing for RTO should help other local businesses in their business network and thus will be beneficial for their company in the long term.

There are broader implications for the economy if a large percentage of people continue to WFH. In larger cities, many smaller businesses, like food outlets, are sustained by workers coming to their city offices most weekdays.

Many such businesses failed during COVID knockdowns due to lack of customers. Some are still struggling to become viable again with a low RTO percentage.

For some medium to large businesses, these struggling smaller businesses or business owners are their customers. So there is some self interest from many companies to go back to the way things were.

Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening.

You are probably thinking of dowels used as loose tenons, where a blind hole is drilled into the mating pieces of wood and the dowel is not visible once the joint is together.

Sometimes people glue a butt or mitre joint, then once the glue has set, drill a through hole for a through dowel from an outside face of the joint.

The blind holes approach is tricky to get perfect alignment on where dowels are being added across a longer length. As a hobbyist I've tried a few cheaper dowelling jigs and had mixed success. This challenge lead to other loose tenon solutions like biscuits or dominos which allow for some side to side misalignment while retaining the ability to keep the visible faces aligned.

The through dowel approach avoids the misalignment problem, but comes with the visibility of the end grain of the dowel on one exposed face. Some people are ok with that.

Dowels are still one of the "strongest" options for end-grain to long-grain joints. Many professional woodworkers now favour dominos simply due to who quick it allows them to work and the additional allowance for some side-to-side alignment.

Shorter words mean less time with your mouth open which means less chance for the flies to get in.

Some pedestrian crossing buttons play different audible beats so blind people know when they can cross. Famously the beat of one in Sydney was sampled for a Billie Eilish song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-zeJRjP6xA skip to around 4:00 mins).

However others have no indicator or sound. To make things even more confusing is the pedestrian crossings can also be programmed to happen automatically at peak times with no button press, but absolutely need a button press outside of peak hour.

Due to my age and work experience, I'm also familiar with archiving involving storing physical documents in cardboard boxes. My current job really is paper free and graduate employees joining will never deal with archive boxes.

Similarly, the icons on my mobile for making a call, answering a call and hanging up are all based on the shape of the handset for a corded phone.

The Save button icon in many applications is based on a 3.5" floppy disk.

I sometimes need to save data as a PDF, which in many cases involves "printing" to PDF. The icon is based on a paper printer, but the action I am using it for doesn't include any external device or paper.

This makes me wonder about what icons we could use in the future where so many actions are done via a touch interface on a phone/tablet. There are less physical objects involved in common actions. So the skeuomorphic approach to icons for buttons is becoming less valid over time especially for younger people.

I'm ok with adding more functions to the titlebar, it's something I experimented with myself for a desktop app some 15 years ago. I found there was a heck of a lot of special behaviours tied to the titlebar and that overriding them meant a lot of work to fix edge cases like - being able to move windows. So I never followed through with it.

Maybe the addition of dedicated Move button next to the minimise, maxmimise and close button would be a reasonable compromise?

That would provide a consistent target to click on with your mouse. Obviously a button is a lot smaller than the entire titlebar for clicking on, so there would be some efficiency loss for people that regularly move windows (I am one of them). Getting move use out of the titlebar space would be worth the minor inconvenience of a more accurate click-drag to move operation.

Java has been around for a longish time. Around the early 2000's there was at least a perception that you should avoid creating too many objects as that carried performance overhead for construction and garbage collection.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1495...

Immutable objects often require you to construct a new object to store an updated value and garbage collect the now unused previous object. So a lot of early Java code was written with mutable objects to avoid performance issues.

The Java Bean spec was written in 1997:

https://blog.joda.org/2014/11/the-javabeans-specification.ht...

In my current role I work as a developer in the finance sector. We are interested in secure coding. Every year we have to complete a secure coding course and pass an assessment.

We have a team dedicated to performing security reviews for most code changes. Your change can't go to Production until it has been assessed by someone from the secure code team. They can request rework if they think you have introduced a vulnerability.

We have regular pen-testing performed.

There are various vulnerability scanners running against the code repos and blocking builds if a dependency is identified to contain a new CVE.

The project I mainly work on has been in active development for decades. It has well defined frameworks for many common actions. Most of the time we are working within those frameworks, which have been already been vetted thoroughly. Ironically, it is rare that we would need to touch code in a way that could introduce a vulnerability.

In a previous role I worked on desktop applications for engineering simulation. There was no requirement for secure coding for those projects as there was no central database. All the models were file based.

So it depends on the project and the risk and consequence of an malicious actor finding a vulnerability and exploiting it. The health and finance sectors have to take secure coding seriously. From experience, many Oil and Gas companies are also super strict on controlling data access and will often request proof that a software application has been security reviewed and pen-tested.

Agree with you on laptops not being ergonomic by themselves for long term use.

Perhaps not an issue for many development activities, but anything involving lots of calculations (CPU or GPU) will inevitably generate a lot of heat.

Desktops tend to be better at dissipating heat.

In a previous job, our desktops massively out performed our similar spec laptops for long running simulations.

Also you can typically attach more storage and GPUs to a desktop than a laptop if you need to.

I regularly get apologised to by customer service people when I have been waiting for coffee of food. Usually something like "Sorry for the wait".

While I am waiting, I often retreat into my own thoughts, mentally processing some difficult problem or trying to plan out a project in my head. When I am thinking hard I adopt a "focus" face with a slight frown with lips pressed together.

The servers must be reading my face as annoyance or anger.

I always say thanks and smile when I collect my order so they know I wasn't unhappy, especially with them.

I guess most people are more "in the moment" and maintain a neutral or friendly face.

https://www.casio.com/intl/watches/protrek/

For many people, being selected for a layoff can feel like you have been judged as a lower performer than your colleagues. The thinking being that the company would always want to retain their best performers. This can cause a big loss of confidence for some people. They will be stuck thinking "Why was I one of those chosen for being laid off?"

Often though, the decision on who to lay off also considers who might be close to retirement, who might cost more to make redundant (redundancy pay in many places is based on years of service and there might also be long service leave owed), and the mixture of skills and knowledge the company thinks it will need going forward.

Also some people will have built up strong relationships with colleagues, teams and clients through their work. Their potential to continue these relationships typically drops dramatically without it being a regular part of work. That can make some people quite sad personally and frustrated that all of the work developing those relationships will suddenly not be very useful anymore.

Many more people can now access dental/orthodontic treatments and minor cosmetic procedures. Getting your teeth straight makes a big difference to your appearance and make you more likely to smile in photographs.

To expand on this a bit, oil and particularly liquefied natural gas (LNG) production facilities are hard to stop and restart. Many systems need to be at a particular temperature, hydrates can form in gas pipelines during long shutdowns and thus need chemical back injection to manage, hot/cold cycling of equipment cause thermal degradation and many other challenges.

So a lot of design work for oil and gas production facilities is around minimising shutdowns. A large part of this is working out storage capacities, and for LNG, the shipping rates. If the LNG carriers (tankers) are unable to offload at a receiving terminal there is a higher chance the LNG loading terminal will reach tank tops. Tank tops at the loading terminal means the upstream production facility will need to turn down or stop all production. Given the high costs (capital and production opportunity) that incurs for the production facility, it might be better to take a short term loss for a few cargoes to prevent the tank tops at the loading terminal and thus a production shutdown.

I have experienced a roofing nail puncture as a cyclist. In Australia roofing nails usually are galvanised with a washer to spread the load held by the head across a corrugated sheet of steel or plastic.

I was riding at around 35 km/hr and believe my rear tyre rolled along the nail from point to head until the tyre hit the washer. The washer then then forced the point of the nail upwards into my tyre, tube and then right through my aluminium rim. There was a very load bang and an near instantaneous loss of tyre pressure. I was lucky it was the rear wheel and not the front so I could keep the bike straight and slow down safely. The wheel wasn't ride-able after that.

In my car the two times I've had puncture were due to roofing screws which also have a built in washer type flange. Again I think the washer/flange acts as a lever helping to flip the point upwards into the tyre. In both cases the car tyre didn't deflate but we could hear the screw hitting the road on every tyre revolution so drove straight to the nearest tyre repair shop to get it fixed.

A few companies I have worked for have had a strict no gifts policy. Many of our customers had similar policies, to the point that we couldn't even pay for a customer's coffees if we have a meeting at a cafe.

These policies are aimed at preventing even the whiff of bribes or favoritism wrt purchasing or awarding of contracts.

Mostly this was in the Oil and Gas industry. We had a few mining clients that were less strict wrt gifts/swag. I now work in the banking industry where there are strict regulations against bribery, facilitation payments and many types of gifts.

So I find it a bit weird to hear that sellers provide "swag".

I just recently replaced a cheap wired keyboard and mouse with a Logitech MX Mini keyboard and a MX Master 3 mouse.

My current WFH desk is not ideal and having a full sized keyboard with numeric keypad meant I couldn't center the keyboard for typing and have enough room to comfortably use the mouse.

I tried to find a ten key less wired keyboard that didn't have noisy mechanical switches. I can clearly hear my colleagues typing on theirs during Teams calls, which is very distracting.

I couldn't find a wired, small form factor keyboard, without mechanical switches. So I went the wireless route. I would have gone wired if I could find one that met my requirements.

Having used the Logitech for about a month, there are some pros and cons. I often like to use pencil and paper to diagram existing code to better think through how to change it. With the wired keyboard I was limited in where I could move the keyboard out of the way. Now I can move the wireless keyboard right off the desk.

I usually work with a work laptop open for Teams voice chat while primarily working via a virtual desktop connection on my personal PC. I haven't done it yet, but the work laptop recognises the wireless keyboard and mouse, so I could switch input between the laptop and PC at the press of a button. This means I wouldn't need to use the laptop keyboard or touchpad for input, freeing me to position the laptop for screen visibility and video chat.

The main cons so far are that the keyboard has lost the wireless connection to the USB dongle a couple of times. This can be temporarily worked around by (ironically) plugging in the USB cable used to charge it. Also the mouse seems to be laggy sometimes. Picking it up and repositioning it on the desk gets it working smoothly again.

Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is mostly methane with some ethane and is typically transported in cryogenic containers as it would require too much pressure to otherwise keep it in a liquid state. Even when transported in cryogenic tanks there is some boil off that is either captured and recompressed or used as fuel for the tanker.

Liqified Petroleum Gas (LPG) is a mixture of propane and butane which does not require cryogenic storage and will remain liquid.

Yep, we did some deep customisation of a couple of key UI widgets and found it very time consuming. Changing the Look and Feel to Nimbus was a major improvement, but that came with semi-regular breakages when performing minor version JVM updates. I vaguely remember us overriding a couple of Nimbus defaults but finding that could have unexpected consequences elsewhere in the UI (ie LaFs are complex), so we didn't go down that path much.

While Swing styling support wasn't that great, I miss the flexibility of nesting layout managers for composing complex, resizable UIs.

When Java FX was first announced, I started learning it to see how we might use it for our applications. At the time it lacked a lot of widgets we needed, but it had much better support for styling. Sadly I didn't keep up with Java FX. While I have no direct need for it in my current job, I still get the itch to whip up the occasional desktop app, so I plan on getting back up to speed soon.

Java Swing apps were portable across Windows, Mac and Linux desktops waaayy back in 2004 and probably earlier. Write once run everywhere _was_ very much possible back then.

The biggest complaint was they didn't look native. From working on a Swing application back then, management and marketing would often ask if we could make it look more like other Windows applications, because looking like a native Windows XP application suggested it was modern and cutting edge.

As soon an iTunes landed on Windows, the requests for UI improvement changed from "make it look like Windows" to "make it look sexy" - which meant different things to different people.

Electron, to me, feels like an attempt to take a browser engine and turn it into a poor replacement for the JVM.

Unlike many (but not all) other animals, humans spend considerable time in close proximity to other humans in enclosed spaces. If you are pungent, other people in an enclosed space with you will not appreciate your smell. I've done quite a few multi week hikes with only fresh water bathing (no soap, no deodorant) with others (2-18 other people). During the hikes we are outdoors and although we gather reasonably close (less than 1m, or a couple of feet) around a campfire or common place to eat it isn't often you'd be offended by someone else's smell. At the end of these hikes when we first get back to civilisation and are in an enclosed space again - you bet we suddenly notice how much we stink.

Many humans cross paths with hundreds to thousands of other humans every day and the set of people interacted can have great variability across days. Growing up we were taught at home and in school how important it is to regularly wash your hands. The only other examples of such a high level of social mingling for other species that springs to mind are insects swarms/hives/nests and when there are plagues (mice, locusts etc). Unlike these groups, humans are unique in having a very high degree of share tool use (door handles, public seating for transport, cross walk and lift buttons), so there is a huge potential for cross contamination. Bathing and washing with soap is probably one of the key reasons we are able to live in cities the way we do without regular disease epidemics.

The Snugglepot and Cuddlepie series of children's books by May Gibbs feature Banksia men as the villains:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snugglepot_and_Cuddlepie