procarch2019

I think it is. I work for a (relatively) small company. I naturally grew from project engineer to senior/lead/sme (including pioneering tech _for my industry_) to SA. I had also stuck with my company for many years, so I have the industry connections and got to be known as a heavy hitter. That trust relationship with the customers mixed with technical know how = sales and consulting.

Again, because of the size of my company I can make my role fluid (including a good way), but call it what you will I engineer, I sell, I consult.

My kids a bit young for reading HP on their own, but it’s our bedtime book series every night. Over the past year or so we’ve (I’ve) read HP before bed. We just started book the Order of the Phoenix.

Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.

I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.

Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.

I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.

They could just switch their dns back to auto (or statically use google/cloudflare/etc depending on how you configure it), no? Then fix it when you’re back.

You could also set up 2 ssids depending on your WiFi set up. Point one to pi hole and the other to a different DNS provider. Instruction if pi hole breaks is just switch WiFi.

As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs.

I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.

Agreed. Due to the long lifecycle of manufacturing equipment we still see a lot of 100mb out there, and it’s not even embedded.

I would note that all new products seem to be gbe or better.

I actually rebound my windows keys to use this instead of default windows snippet tool. Sure, if I need a high level of editing I’ll bring it into some other program (still using flame shot to take a capture). 95% the built in arrows, boxes, numbers, etc do the quick attention calling I need.

Bonus, this was a piece of ‘bloatware’ an admin rebuilt my computer with, but I came to love.

I mean, I guess I get it for certain things. Silly to mandate it though. Anyone who has work requiring them to be in the office should be in the office. My in office time jumps up to 3-5 days per week when I have a new employee until they’re somewhat self sufficient. My in office time jumps when I have to prepare hardware for a project *in house*. My in office time plummets when I’m doing a software project hosted on one of my customers systems.

I guess what I’m saying is just be pragmatic and get your stuff done.

P.S. One of my senior guys is a road warrior, highly effective and I see him in the office maybe three times a year.

Yes, one by one. It’s just tedious. There’s always a solution.

Often time screenshots correlate to steps. You open wordpad and start a numbered list. Write what action you perform and the screenshot. Repeat until you’re all the way done. Take it off the system, print it, sign and date it and attach to an MOC and your done.

I supposed you could copy and save in paint. Then do the same thing in Word off the system by dropping in all the images. Idk, doesn’t sound like that much more work, but it’s annoying enough.

Yes, in the automation world living on level 2/2.5 wordpad is great for doing things like taking screenshots too. In a GMP facility it could take some significant effort to get a screenshot tool or a rich text editor installed. Also, taking pictures with a phone is usually a huge no no.

Occasionally, you have to document something with…screenshots. Now, some versions of Windows Server come with snipping tool, which lets you save a screen shot. Others you still have to use the print screen key. Then what… well, you open wordpad and paste.

Luckily most of the systems we interact with now we get to install Office when the system is being qualified. Could be a huge PIA though otherwise.

edit: level 2/2.5 means no internet connection and therefore no browser based editors.

Hah, you don’t have to tell me about validation and quality. Yes, they usually account for a significant time of anything in the pharma world.

I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing.

One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day.

I think most are 3+ weeks sample to treatment right now. Still amazing though.

Occasionally I find myself somewhere I need to access email but have no network connection. No local cache means a big ol’ screw me

Need MS for other toolings

No more IMAP

As pointed out elsewhere. My comment wasn’t really on outlook itself. There are other things that bind me to MS ecosystem.

I’m sure that’s true for a lot of people.

I’ll have to check it out, but sometimes I think I should just lean in to all the MS integrations.

I do like OneNote and use the ‘Send to OneNote’ for meeting notes all the time.

It does, but the applications and environments I need to use are Windows only anyway.

IT policy also doesn’t let us have anything other than Windows. I could skirt it for the day to day stuff, but I wouldn’t want to maintain my setup in multiple places anyway

I don’t do more work outside of my professional work.

I get away with just my phone and an iPad for everything else.

I think anyone using outlook is probably using it out of necessity for work.

Not everyone can just jump to Linux when they work in a company.

I still use the mobile site and am convinced that the piss poor design of that is dark patterns to get people to give up and use the app.

Just putting this out there because I guess I don’t know, but is it possible that most users don’t care *yet*. Isn’t it possible that the API changes could have a direct impact on the content or commenting?

I disagree. There’s a huge amount of garbage out there, sure, but some communities are super active and can be used for learning. Take the PowerShell community for example or SysAdmin. I pop on those regularly to ask and answer questions. Google questions related to IT (and I’m assuming other areas of interest) and I bet there’s a Reddit post that comes up in the top 5-10 results (along with stack and other well known forums).

I miss doing fun little projects with atmel MCUs. They were easy to get started with using either arduino or C. I often found myself blogging or documenting my projects just like this, which is funny since it wasn’t “work.”

Then at some point I got too busy with work (and a kid) so I stopped messing around with them.

I didn’t realize how helpful learning low level I/O design and implementation was to my current job (control systems) until much later on. I’m pretty confident my hobbying helped me understand design decisions for the software that we worked in for my day job. Types, and more importantly type casting, was relatively ubiquitous in MCU programming. The software we used in my day job casted all types implicitly. So many times when we found a bug in that software it was due to some casting issue. Granted I was implementing “code” in that platform, but not a software engineer, so it was funny having relatively deep technical conversations with the software engineers when we had to engage them.

What about the content of the article? I admit I’m a NYT print reader as well and don’t really look at their online content, so I wasn’t aware. It makes sense in context of my comment that they change the title, but wondering if they run the actual contents through something too.

Worried we’re headed for (arrived at) some dystopia where we’ll need to have AI filter and sort all the AI created crap to be able to consume anything meaningful.

My wife and I were just discussing this. I could tell it was poorly constructed just scrolling through.

I guess what I don’t understand is how this gets to the top. Don’t other people see this garbage and just ignore it too? Is there another mechanism in the background that pushed it up?

It appears to me that recent trends include a lot of titles that seem more click-baity and often have quality of content that matches low effort, attention grabbing titles.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a HN problem, but instead a trending style in publishing articles. I still find gems here and there, but overall I find leisurely consumption of the media online less and less appealing. Fun tech dives or thoughtful articles are less common (or drowned out by the fodder). I remember a time (maybe 10+ years ago) when I would read 10+ of the top 30 posts. Now it’s more like 2 or 3 and I don’t have the heart to load up another 30.

Then again, maybe it’s just me becoming an old curmudgeon failing to adjust to the times.

I’ve never seen rack mount kits for that equipment. Best bet would be to buy some rack shelves and affix standard equipment to it. Get a little horizontal PDU or 2 for the back side and you’re made.

Originally I got interested in radios when I learned to deploy wifi for industrial applications. The big thing with industrial applications is interference and reflection. You typically have a lot of large structures made of metal or other materials that block the waves. Also, there’s a bunch or rotating equipment that emits emf as well (interferers). This can make antenna placement critical.

I wish I had gotten into it earlier, but I was discourage by a university professor who basically told my senior design groups that radios were too finicky for us to tackle.

Now I participate in amateur radio and I suggest anyone who finds the topics interesting to do the same.

Specifically selecting the right type of antenna and placing and orienting it correctly. Very easy for omni’s (mostly). Terribly annoying for spatial or directional.

Radios are fascinating. Optimizing and enhancing your radio capabilities is a black hole of time and money, but in return you gain knowledge and satisfaction.

Reddit mobile site does this when you tap a post. It drives me nuts. Then you have to hit back, which refreshes Reddit and brings you back to the top. I think it’s intentionally designed to get people to switch to the app.