tapanjk

"Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you the Internet."

https://youtu.be/Vywf48Dhyns?si=uOwUSAr1F_QSShfj&t=67

His personal website is down too.

"What's been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping."

Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.

The initial advisory list includes Broadcom, Dell, Google, HP, Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Linus Torvalds, and Tim Sweeny.

Two individuals along with multi-billion dollar corporations. Curious why the organizations that these individuals represent were not included instead?

I always thought Slackware [1] was the basic Linux distro which people could use to 'understand' Linux. How does Slackware compare to LFS in terms of understanding the Linux fundamentals?

[1] http://www.slackware.com/

Research shows us statistical trends but what we care about most is what works for us. That can be answered only by an individual. In my case, I went from "hurray! work from home!" at the start of Covid lock-downs, to "I miss the white-board discussions at office". Fortunately, the tech industry is now large and diverse enough that you can find work that suites your style.

Well said. This should be part of orientation for every new college student.

A thought experiment, something you may not want to hear. Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time? Also, while you are at office 5 days a week, how about try to get to the next level before you switch? Many will leave (just like you are planning to) and hence it will be easier for the long timers to get promoted in an environment where there will be a lot of inflow of new employees at all levels.

I am not suggesting that this is the right way to think about your situation, but that it is 'another way' to think about it. Who knows, you might end up profiting from this adversity. Wish you all the best!

One of the tendencies I see in reviews is that the reviewer focuses on the wrong stuff. For e.g. when reviewing the design document, they focus on the validity of the requirements and they may even stray into commenting on formatting and grammar in the document; when reviewing code, they focus on design; when reviewing test cases, again they focus on reviewing requirements; when reviewing deployment scripts, they focus on the choise of infrastructure. Basically, people tend to pay attention to things that are already past the decision stage while ignoring the matter at hand.

(2013)

You might think it’s obvious what an acronym means, but a new reader may not.

The other scenario is when the reader is not new, but it is too late to ask.

If you’re serious about making an impact in the world, power down your smartphone, close your browser tabs, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

I have tried, but find it difficult. Were you able to successfully "kick" social media addiction? How?

It's a hard job to pull it off! But if you can parachute behind the enemy front lines, and land a job as a CTO, you can make this happen.

Bravo! :D

Although the efficiency of the device is theoretically 67 per cent, the current design is around 12 per cent efficient. This could be improved if a better conductor of heat than the lead scandium tantalate were found, says Defay.

This looks promising, but may not be practical yet.

I am reading Deschooling Society [1] by Ivan Illich, published in the early 1970s. Even though I do not agree with everything he says, he does make some compelling arguments.

[1] https://archive.org/details/DeschoolingSociety

The previous significant update was over a decade ago. I’ve since evolved my implementation of GTD, but mostly I’m back where I was back then.

Bookmarked https://gtdfh.liw.fi/ to read later.

Can you please elaborate? What is it that a used $500 camera can do which an iPhone cannot? This is a genuine question, not a challenge.

People have never bought Apple because of the hardware.

Actually, a lot of people do. Here's one famous example [1], and I also know people in my network who love their MacBooks for the hardware.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-...

I find them useless simply because it takes way too long to dry the hands completely. A handkerchief or a tissue does the job in a second. Also, maybe it's just me, but I find my palms a bit sticky after drying them with hot air.

Among inflammatory substances, alcohol is the elephant in the room. Cutting out alcohol is the lowest hanging fruit in this garden. Unfortunately, people convince themselves that it is perfectly healthy when consumed in small quantities every day. Anybody who monitors their health/fitness parameters with a smart watch will notice how damaging alcohol is.

Talking about scolling alone, the PgUp and PgDwn keys on my big honking external keyboard are life savers.

Excellent article; thank you for sharing. It dates back to 2005, and the following caught my eye:

PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate.

Alas, the days of "bloggers are more authentic than the print media" are long gone. The PR people are now everywhere: blogs, social media, messaging apps, movies, OTT series etc. The "crap" pervades all media, not just print. The PR has indeed mutated as predicted.

Basically, the general guidance in this post now applies to _anything_ you read.

Going through the comments, it feels like this topic is for people in tech what "physicians prefer to die at home" is for physicians. Knowing the inner workings of a system perhaps makes us avoid it?

Code. Every. Day.

You sound like Raymond Reddington.

Even as a relatively young person, articles about death are scary, sad and peaceful, it's such a weird mix of emotions.

Articles about death are scary because you are a young person. Most older people report that they are comfortable talking and/or contemplating about death.

At this point, this was the fastest Ruby upgrade we had ever done. We broke this record with the release of Ruby 3.2.1, which we adopted on release day.

Whether this makes sense depends on your company/team's incentives.

Even in a world where AI-assisted code reigns — being a distributed systems expert might be the key to unlocking AI in every program.

This is the aspect of AI that most software developers are either missing or willfully ignoring. AI in itself is a very narrow and deep topic which requires immense amount of domain knowledge and skills, but deploying AI solutions and using AI for business applications is mostly not about AI, but about distributed systems. That is the area where an increasing amount of "labor" will be deployed, and hence the job market is going to see a steep demand for engineers.

When I think of these long podcasts as movies, 2 to 3 hours sounds doable. However you will spend time on a movie or a podcast only if you think it will be worth your time. It turns out, some of them are indeed worth it. You don't have to watch them all.

This approach works if you expect your workers to be experts. This of course works for some companies that have the ability to attract workers who are highly skilled as well as they are generalists, and hence can efficiently and skillfully perform a range of activies. The risk is also high in that it is difficult to replace such workers. The majority of the industry works on minimizing this particular risk and hence they create teams where each worker can perform a subset of tasks well. Basically, scattering your eggs in different baskets.

Anyways, this was a nice read. Also good to know that some companies can operate in an unconventional way and also make good profit (because of and not in spite of) their unconvential way of working.