I can't speak to GP's intention, but I've personally witnessed a guy on my team who was trying to position himself as the go-to technical dude. He was jockeying for a management role. When QA or customer support had questions about our products, he'd always have an answer. I would say that at least 50% of the time, his answer was completely fabricated nonsense. He'd wildly misrepresent projects that his teammates were working on. I also saw several incidents of cargo-cult programming from him. Bizarrely, this never bit him in the ass and now he's a middle manager at a FAANG. This experience leaves me without much hope for the future of software development as a career.
Years ago, an article in MCN said that something like 3/4 of all single vehicle motorcyclist fatalities involved alcohol. They also mentioned that Harley cruiser culture was wildly overrepresented. Hopefully, with Baby Boomers aging out of riding, bar-hopping biker culture is disappearing, too.
2) Pay attracts workers. "Happiness" is a separate and personal issue.
3) Anecdata.
4) The fact is that far higher wages would attract American teachers for short periods. It is a free market, until exploitable labor is introduced. Foreign teachers absolutely are suppressing wages, as evidenced by the fact that the wages aren't high enough to attract American teachers.
the schools have to choose between giving these kids subpar teachers who are happy to live up there, or miserable teachers who are only doing it for the money.
1) Why is that the dichotomy?
2) Do you say the same thing about well-paid oilfield workers living in RVs, away from their families and social networks?
3) Do you think the foreign workers are happy to be in Alaska for the sake of the Alaskan experience?
For some reason, people are convinced that teacher salaries have to be suppressed, lest the "wrong people" take the jobs. As if stressing about making rent is a critical signal of virtue, exclusively for teaching.
whereas Unixen have a core task context model of a bunch of threads that by default do not share memory.
How are those not simply child processes? I don't understand your use of the word 'threads' here.
Does the Unix world not distinguish between threads and processes? In Win32, threads exist within processes, and you can create new threads or child processes.
I would like to know the history of this car. I'm not doubting the claims, but a plausible explanation is that he bought the car used, possibly with a salvage title, and the flipper he bought it from bypassed the blown airbag. Airbags are expensive, and it's not uncommon to just replace the steering wheel cover where it went off.
Now, they have replaced aluminum with lead to increase the strength of the binding of the pairs in the semiconductor, and the key quantum states last 20 seconds
Anyone want to give a layman-ish explanation of why aluminum versus lead makes such a huge difference?
54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level. People word-mash "alot", "atleast", and now "eachother" all the time. Sports commentators use verse when they mean versus.
I'm not suggesting that you correct your customers, but there's no reason to sink to the lowest common denominator when writing.
I don't know if it quite meets the criteria, but I really enjoyed Lodge 49, particularly after watching awful people doing awful things in Succession. I've also enjoyed everything that Steve Conrad has made, for similar feel-good reasons.
EVs are required to produce sound for pedestrian safety, but they are absolutely beginning to make faked IC engine sounds for aesthetic appeal. See the Ioniq 5 and Dodge Charger EV.
Five or ten years ago, the local Kroger introduced 3D, photorealistic, shaded stickers as advertisements on the floor. I once nearly fell over because, after peering at something on a shelf, I went to take a step back and caught sight of a floor sticker out of the corner of my eye. I instinctively tried to step over this fictional obstacle, even though I had just noted it moments earlier as I walked up.
I assume I wasn't the only one to have this problem, because they were gone by the next time I went shopping.
That said, there are so many drivers already distracted by their phones and 'infotainment' systems that I don't know if obnoxious advertisements will make things any worse.
What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff...
While I think he's pretty obviously speaking to an audience of office workers, I'll point out that there's a significant difference between cooking or building something a thousand times per day and shipping it out versus seeing the ongoing function of something you made with your own hands.
I've worked in food service, and I've done metal fabrication as a hobby. I can say that I get ongoing satisfaction from using something that I've invented and built with my own hands, versus all those sandwiches and fried foods that I passed to customers.
I've occasionally lamented that I didn't pursue civil engineering instead of software. Most or all of the software that I wrote for companies has disappeared from the world. I believe that I would've taken great satisfaction from seeing a bridge or other infrastructure that I might've had a hand in creating.
As a 90s Amiga kid, I am deeply offended by the cultural appropriation. ;-)
This was an excellent read. It always amazes me when people discover functionality in old hardware, even if it couldn't be exploited at the time. It reminds me of "8088 MPH", the demo of 1024 colors on CGA, from 2015:
Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10.
I believe that it has always supported multiple desktops since the introduction of the NT kernel. There just wasn't any UI provided in the OS for switching. I used a Microsoft PowerToy to switch between desktops, I think all the way back to NT 4.0.
Something like five to ten years ago, when AI hype was starting to hit media, one of the claims was that AI would come for middle-management first. Since middle-management can generally be described as collecting information from underlings and reporting information to upper management, their work was supposed to be easy to automate with AI. As far as I can tell, this hasn't proven to be true at all, and we software engineers proudly wrote ourselves out of work by constantly publishing our source code and discussing it openly.
Back around 2005, I worked with a guy who was trying to position himself as the go-to expert on the team. He'd always jump at the chance to explain things to QA and the support team. We'd occasionally hear follow-up questions from those teams and realize that he was just making things up.
He was also had a serious case of cargo-cult mentality. He'd see some behavior and ascribe it to something unrelated, then insist with almost religious fervor that things had to be coded in a certain way. He was also a yes-man who would instantly cave to whatever whim management indicated. We'd go into a meeting in full agreement that a feature being requested was damaging to our users, and he'd be nodding along with management like a bobble-head as they failed to grasp the problem.
Management never noticed that he was constantly misleading other teams, or that he checked in flaky code he found on the Internet that triggered multiple days of developer time to debug. They saw him as a highly productive team player who was always willing to "help" others.
He ended up promoted to management.
Anyway, my point is that management seems to care primarily about having their ego boosted, and about seeing what they perceive as a hard worker, even if that worker is just spinning his wheels and throwing mud on everyone else. I'm sure that AI is only going to exacerbate this weird, counter-productive corporate system.
Reminds me of the reason that grass yards exist: to show the world that one can afford land for the sake of owning it, rather than for growing crops.