HN user
aspiring author, bibliophile, code chimp, javascript enthusiast, linux lover, php freak, ruby hacker, webologist
Still using that 2019 MBP (16 inch, 16G memory) as a daily work machine.
Is still handling the load well, though at times, fans get quite loud, especially with all the background processes and VM setups.
Hope to get a new MBP this year, as being on Intel means lots of software that won't run on it (ie, Codex app for example, won't run on Intel Macs)
Yes.
Partly because of ephemeral nature of most cloud platforms / services, and also the vagaries of proprietary specific configuration.
No.
These factors that I'm speaking of were more along the lines of:
- a slab caster implemented, but there is already a bloom caster and only one crane facility to support both so both ran at less than optimal throughput.
- choosing to prioritize far less profitable slab casting for output to a joint venture plant in CA than very profitable bloom casting (& union definitely not in favor of this)
- buying coke at 10X price they could get elsewhere because old buddy favoritism
Basically, the Japanese firms were built a much more holistic basis -- JIT engineering, so that liquid is pored, slabs created and were delivered right into finished product processing. Whereas, by contrast, in the mill I worked at, slabs would be cast, then would cool in a yard, heated & slitted, then heated again for strip mill processing (it cost quite a bit of energy to heat to 2200/2300 degrees).
I mean, my boss & I would even spitball on how much better the place would run if it was bought out and run by (at that time, late 80s / early 90s) a foreign competitor that made decisions on business sense rather than old boy political network machinations.
Basically, all about: MANAGEMENT, MANAGEMENT, MANAGEMENT.
It's been a few decades but I worked for USS as a developer, after attaining a computer science degree.
I know it's a tired old adage that labor / labor unions was the reason for American steel manufacturing decline and rise of Japanese dominance. But from the inside, that simply wasn't so -- it was more a case that Japanese mills not only more modern but the entire manufacturing process, from casting to finished product, was more efficient. Even when new US mills gained new technology, it wasn't thought through and decisions seemed to be made the basis of old boy network than solid business acumen.
There are still many features not working.
I used to search within lists (was like the best feature of Twitter, for my usage) quite a bit -- after Musk gutted the team after taking over, it no longer works, and has been that way for many months.
1. Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein — have read other titles by this author & they were mostly meh, but this is an incredible book, hard to describe, better to experience. Ostensibly is about how the author is often confused with Naomi Wolf who went down conspiracy rabbit holes but it is so much more than that.
2. The Myth of Christian Beginnings by Robert Wilkin — an older title (1971), short well written book on how Christians mythologize early Christians, & frame it as some static model of heavenly perfection that they're always trying to get back to, or maintain
3. Everyday Utopia by Kristen Ghodsee — on the surface, a book about utopian community experiments but is so much more, imaginative conjuring on thinking outside the box, how we blindly just accept things the way they are, so dismissive of nonorthodox ideas
4. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris — just as the title advertises, have read a lot of history but the 19C on California presented here was so interesting
Sorry, but the Here Comes Everybody phenomenon Clay Shirky predicted has not worked out so well. Public discourse doesn’t work at scale. It’s fine at the corner pub. Watch out for Joe. He says crazy bigoted stuff. Whenever Joe comes in, we stop talking about politics and change the subject to sports. Five people can moderate or avoid the intransigent bigotry of someone in their real community.
These local, non-scaled examples of public discourse are not a replacement for CNN or the New York Times. But neither is social media, even though so many people now think they’ve got to run to those platforms to get the real story. That’s because the real news networks are turning to twitter as if it were a primary source. Let’s go to Twitter to find out how the public feels about this war. Really? That’s like going to the psych ward at Bellevue to find out how people feel about current events. If you report from X, you’re in even worse shape because Musk has gone and tweaked the whole thing to favor authoritarianism. He’s institutionalized and amplified the worst qualities of the mob.
The clash between professionalism & "everybody gets to play".
It seems we need a CSS: The Good Parts guide here.
Obligatory Cory Doctorow link on enshitification:
A few years back, I wrote a web based publishing tool that used `wkhtmltopdf` to generate PDF from database content along with web images (& even more complicated with API access & Google Maps API). It took a lot of tinkering but it worked. At times, extra fiddling needed to generate accurately the Table of Contents (basic, uses `H1-6` elements in document) with proper page references and formatting. But it worked, even with allotting for stuff like "bleed" (it was being printed a massive color printer we leased that could bind or staple.
This is a thing now when applying for developer jobs.
When I was looking for a job in 2020-2021, I think it happened everywhere I got past the original opening interview round.
Sometimes the task was trivial or even submitting code samples (which can be problematic if the relevant examples were done for a previous proprietary interest that would not be agreeable to share this code). Other cases were more elaborate, requiring a half-day of work or more.
In one instance, I had an assignment for a front end JS / UX page, completed the assignment then heard back from the prospective employer that according to their review of my "homework" submission, I was overqualified for the position.
I mean, you can say "no", but then in all probability the prospective employer is going to proceed to the next candidate.
My own app concoction, written in Ruby & Sinatra and JS-less at the moment, one of these days going to upgrade and enhance as I wrote it while I was out of work during COVID days. As I age I don't have the energy to keep pace with side projects anymore.
After Google Reader I used Feedly for years, even ponying up for a Pro subscription. But I was forced out as they capped on sub total (even as a Pro customer) and I was unable to add new feeds & the tools to identify and prune "dead" feeds (even there, I treat my RSS pool as a stream to wade in when needed / desired and didn't want to delete even inactive feeds, just feeds that got hijacked by spam farms). So I wrote my own.
Initially had grandiose vision of opening it up to anyone but it needs some UX work 1st (and a better DB model than a SQLite DB on a shared host lol).
Absolutely, the WP ecosystem cultivates this mindset.
The reliance on plugins to do a lot of heavy lifting (admittedly, a lot of these stray far from the original blog engine WP provides) but that is because WP is used as more than a blog now, more than a CMS, it's like a core with a myriad of swiss army knife appendages.
Definitely, https://gomakethings.com is what I instantly thought of after reading the OP.
Universal Baseball Association, J Henry Waugh, Prop -- Dice Game
They already have been, since the early 90s & I'm sure most mainframe / COBOL codebases are maintained by offshore staff.
My favorite: https://classless.de/
Yes. Mostly in digital form (O'Reilly Safari or whatever it's called now, though I don't know if I can heartily recommend, quality of titles has seemed to diminish in the offerings).
Occasionally will spring for a hardcopy book form.
True, most are outdated fairly quickly and few have long lasting value beyond 1-2 years. But when done right, nothing is better than a good text to guide you from beginner to intermediate, or intermediate to advanced. I've tried watching video but it just doesn't seem like an efficient mode (for most video courses, there are exceptions and wonderful video courses).
Is interesting, wish it was updated -- it looks like most recent link is from 2017.
Jose Saramago would hate this.
Before I used homebrew, I was a MacPorts user and that was a terrible experience for me.
Been running with homebrew for at least a decade since, and I cannot recall any negative encounter other than the hassle of grabbing xcode command line tools when I upgrade a major version of Mac OS, which is a minor detail.
I get the appeal of MacPorts & a dedicated separate package path but it caused all sorts of problems for me v. the integrated approach of homebrew.
O there was another negative now I remember -- had to uninstall brew version of MacVim & install manually. But that not a big issue either & typically, all of the brew packages are CLI only for me.
But democracy dies in darkness!
To remember book titles years later, or even months later, to revisit, or just to share with an interested friend or family member.
As a repository to clip highlighted text or notes and/or annotations.
I have been using `goodreads` over the past decade, but the app / website has largely languished, and is frustrating, especially the slow load times.
So true.
And so sad.
And now excuse me while I dream of a world where gifted creators can build a flourishing web gathering space where it can thrive and grow and not be then harvested by the borg that encapsulates viewers as nothing but breathing credit card tokens.
I miss Google Reader.
Migrated to Feedly & Feedly has been OK but recently, soured on Feedly as they capped the number of feeds. And I've written my own RSS readers, pre-Google-Reader & now in 2021 (though it a work in progress & starting to buckle with a 300MB sqlite DB file on a shared host ;)). Those limits might not rankle many subscribers but I don't view RSS as a "I must consume every item" but as a stream to wade in, and a filtered repository to query.
The technology of a RSS reader is banal & simple in the basics. But here is where the value is for me -- the history of all the stuff that scrolls off from the most recent 10, 25, 50 posts that are available on a RSS feed. Having a large collection of subscribed feeds is like having a filtered search window into only those web sources that you assign great relevance. Even in 2021, a even more pronounced chasm to Google (or DDG or $yourFavoriteSearchEngine) searches, given all the botification / content farm hijacking / general cruft / copied content / etc. -- to search in your own set of collected RSS feeds, that go back years, even if disappear off a site's current feed XML. Or even if the site goes poof, or worse, is reappropriated by a domain harvester to siphon ad generated revenue on boiler plate content.
Google Reader, if it was championed by Google, could have served this role masterfully. (There still is, oddly, in existence Google Custom Search Engine where you can specify a collection of URLs but it doesn't to seem to work as well as searching RSS history, in my experience at least).
Location: Arizona
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Maybe
Technologies: Bash, C, Docker, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sinatra, SQL, WordPress
Resume/CV: https://resume.nauminous.net/
Email: naum [at] cox [dot] net
Senior software developer with many years of work experience. Proficient in programming languages on both open source platforms and older legacy systems. Strong in problem-solving skills. Enthusiastic lifelong learner eager to gain mastery in new technologies.
Location: Arizona
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Maybe
Technologies: Bash, C, Docker, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sinatra, SQL, WordPress
Resume/CV: https://resume.nauminous.net/
Email: naum [at] cox [dot] net
Senior software developer with many years of work experience. Proficient in programming languages on both open source platforms and older legacy systems. Strong in problem-solving skills. Enthusiastic lifelong learner eager to gain mastery in new technologies.
After using Waze for over a couple of years, I really started getting the impression that I was just a data pawn in a bunch of A/B tests -- like send this one down that route, send that one down the other way & see what happens.
I'd been using Waze for a couple of years, and initially it was far superior to Apple Maps. But a few months back, I got really frustrated with it because it led me down some closed roads & ended up doubling my commute time home from work that day. I'd also been noting how off it was on its estimates on when I'd get to my destination. And I was also perturbed by it not knowing the back street entrance to my work site, though I've "paved it" on multiple occasions, it it remains uncorrected.
So I switched over to Apple Maps and started tracking how often it is off in its estimates (& also trip duration) -- I have like a commute that can be anywhere from 40 minutes to 90 minutes or more, depending on traffic -- and I was pleasantly surprised that it got me to destination within +/-5 minutes of when it said it would and that the journey was taking less time that with Waze. It also knew about the back entrance of my work site and was able to route better with some of the smaller side streets in the neighborhood too.
I've always preferred the Apple Maps UI -- it shows all the lanes at top, stoplights are more prominently shown, though the speedometer on Waze was nice, plus Waze alerted you to police presence too. It gives you a buffer when wishing to change route (Waze frequently would change the route and instruct me to take an exit that was 300 feet away when I was in the furthest lane from the exit side) to check off and is totally ad-free, and incorporated into iOS (yeah, Apple monopoly and all, true).