You're never going to get promoted with that attitude!
I'm joking...but not entirely. It sounds impressive on a promo packet when you say you've saved 100 TB of RAM / $$$ through whatever technique. But it sounds a lot less impressive when you say if this system grows to this size in x years, I will have saved 100 TB, especially when no one yet knows how large the system will really be in that time or what the cost of RAM will be. I dunno, maybe if you say that x years ago, I made a decision that now is saving us 100 TB, that's kinda impressive, but you're also getting credit for it x years after you did the work. It also doesn't have the implication that it must be inherently complex/hard because some other smart person chose the other way. And there is a bias to care more about recent accomplishments. So I don't really think it'd be valued the same at all.
Also, in general big tech (at least Google) prefers growing the userbase over improving efficiency. Periodically efficiency is rewarded, e.g. when RAM cost suddenly balloons or some big must-have feature has suddenly used up capacity planned for something else. You get rewarded for doing efficiency work on demand, not eagerly.
I once got a $100 peer bonus for finding 100,000 cores that were essentially stranded by an accounting error in another team's migration script.
> Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.
If they are indeed saying understaffing doesn't matter because their current customers don't care, their loyalty numbers will only go up because of that sampling bias. Relatively upscale fast casual places (e.g. Chipotle) will replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.
The "world" chart shows an increase from 19% renewal to 34%. Did they cherry-pick that? (Also, "European Union" is more than one country.)
> I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.
Does that distinguish renewables from fossil fuels? Haven't governments been essentially subsidizing fossil fuels (not least by allowing environmental externalities to be ignored) for as long as they've been in use?
Because a lot of countries in the world, especially the EU, are subsidizing solar. That doesn't make it economical.
Externalities ignored from fossil fuels, yes. That's not a subsidy though. I'm not saying they should ignore it, but if they do, they aren't the ones who pay for it.
That's not a good point though, a lot of countries, including the EU, also subsidize fossil fuels.
Solar is cheaper, but requires more room and time to spin up (think datacenters, where you can put a turbine within a month) and storage or backups for windless nights.
Agree with your broader point, but out of curiosity:
> It cost her nearly $10k to have a _used_ aluminum ramp installed for her house.
Why so expensive? I did a quick search, and the only way I could get a (new) aluminum ramp up to $10k was by selecting the 30-foot platform model, [1] which I'd guess would be excessive in most cases. I'm not counting installation fees but it looks like something I could do myself in an hour, and I'm not that handy.
The author is seeing that it's easier for one team to get backing (VC money, course credit, design awards, TED talk applause, etc.) for "solving" an accessibility problem than for us to enforce that entire industries follow good accessibility practices in new work and retrofit existing work. In theory industry-wide enforcement is the sort of thing legislation like the ADA solves, but obviously that hasn't been completely effective. Not sure how to fix it.
There was a subthread recently complaining about password managers and their UX problems. These aren't aimed specifically at "disabled" users, but I think it's a similar situation. We can't reliably enforce good standards for sign-in (whether that's just setting the autofill attribute correctly and choosing the correct event handlers for Javascript validators or something far more ambitious), so we expect a password manager to just deal with the web as it is. IMHO they work remarkably well given that constraint, but it's not optimal overall.
Yeah, it kinda feels like a banal thing to hate on. "They're only doing this because it's easier to create a prototype invention than to redo all design standards and enforcement in the country!" I mean, yeah? What exactly is the implied alternative for the sort of individuals targeted by the blog post?
The video of the prototype invention has the effect of making people think they don't need to be concerned about ramps and doorknobs and ADA enforcement because some teen in a garage has just solved this problem forever. People who need accommodations also require the political support of able-bodied people in order to actually make change happen, and his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
> his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
That seems like a major stretch. Really feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here, like saying that a video about improved airbags means that nobody will care about safer road design anymore.
If it weren't for all the supermassive cars rolling around, purchased because they're ostensibly safer in a crash for the person driving them (while markedly decreasing the safety of the other driver) then maybe I could agree with you. But with so many people intentionally electing to value their individual safety at cost of the safety of others, I actually think that it makes for a great reason for them to not think about road safety! Who cares if the road is unsafe if I'm driving a tank?
The expressed (not implied) alternative in the post is for those people to stop pretending they care, and start actually caring. Stop trying to save the world. The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.
People do care, but there are so many problems in the world, and only so much caring to go around.
It's extremely cynical to view it as "people pretend to care", rather than looking around and realizing there's a ton of important problems out there that the caring is distributed over. People care about disabilities, but they also care about war, about public schooling, about the environment, about feminism, about animal rights, about transparency in government, about road safety, about child well-being, about unemployment, and so on. All of these are important things, and of course there are dozens more that I haven't listed.
And inventions are sometimes actually useful. Sure, most of those prototypes will go nowhere, but every once in a while something that really helps is invented. And you can't predict in advance only the ones that will actually go on to help.
Some people actually care, but they can't always win the battle at their own companies when there are other priorities, much less go fix all the other websites, pour concrete at other businesses, etc. Is the solution for everyone to care? If, so how do you accomplish that? ("Americans with Disability Act" v2?)
The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.
This is an excellent summary of the sort of anti-tech thinking that I strongly disagree with. Caring about people with Alzheimer's is well and good, but what we actually want are vaccines and cures.
The dream of a vaccine or cure is all well and good, but when my grandfather has Alzheimer's today and there's no properly functioning social supports, processes, etc to get him into a home and it takes months and months of phone calls and panicked searches when he wanders off to improve the situation at all, I think maybe there really is a dearth of "caring about the problem and not just the solution"
There's a general problem on the web (and to a lesser extent computing in general) that UX is just widely terrible. I think part of this is because developers tend to work at the very edge of their competence, and getting something working at all is a major feat, with no room left over for making it work well. And part of it is developers or designers deciding they know better than everyone else. A lot of this was a solved problem back in the 80s: the platform provides a standard UI toolkit and a set of standard idioms, and all software uses them. But this lesson is ignored because developers and designers don't like it when their stuff looks and works just like everything else. Making buttons that look like everyone else's buttons means you don't set yourself apart, so we end up with custom buttons that look different and don't work as well. And, of course, are less accessible, because accessibility requires integration into the overall system that doesn't exist with a custom solution.
I was a Mac fiend back in the "beleaguered" days, and standard widgets and idioms were a big deal in that community. There was broad consensus that apps should all look and work the same, as much as that was possible. A button should be a button and a text field should be a text field no matter what program it was in. That all went out the window with the web, for no particularly good reason, and it's infecting non-web platforms at an alarming rate.
100% agree about the UX problems. Most engineers would be happy to fix those issues, but of course, companies always want the new features...because that's what customers want and what drives more $$$.
Sadly, it's true that the % of new sales generated by improving a11y beyond the bare minimum isn't going to be terribly large. That's why it's important to have regulations that mandate decent support, because the monetary incentive that drives corporate behavior just isn't there.
I feel like that hasn't been true for a long time. Companies no longer compete on featuresets. I mean take any tool you've used for 10-15 years, the trend is often less features, not more. And the irony is that its the products from the biggest most well compensated companies in the world falling into this pattern of removing features and making things slower and less usable over time. Compare humble old VLC, no shortage of features, to what google routinely does to their products.
Quality, functionality, standing on its own merits, no longer is the aim of business. It is about capturing the mindshare through propaganda a.k.a. advertising. It is why these shitty companies can continue to exist on the top while serving continually inferior tooling: they've flooded the mindshare such that even if some superior product came about, it would never gain traction.
> I'm pretty sure doing janky things to the AC you don't own is a lease violation.
Why? Not all "janky" things are the same:
* Sloppy changes to the internal 240V wiring: yeah probably a violation of the lease, and legitimately likely to burn the place down, with associated liability.
* Temporarily mounting to the exterior this mechanism that turns the knob shaft, with no changes to the wiring, no holes, no nothing. I can't think what grounds they'd have for considering this a lease violation or a reason to keep any of the security deposit, as long as you pop the original knob back on when you move out. And as inigyou pointed out, how would they even know?
> The rest of this blog post is a walkthrough of a software engineer’s approach to home automation and building custom hardware, and let me tell you: both the final product, and the journey to get there, are hella jank.
IMHO it's not that bad? With the disclaimer that I'm also a software engineer who dabbles very very lightly with electronics and has no mechanical engineering expertise. But the overall approach of doing this by stepper motor seems quite defensible given the security deposit constraint. The only part that seems really janky to me is that it's not physically held in place that well as noted in this paragraph:
> Ultimately, the biggest issue is that binder clips and cardboard aren’t quite as robust of a mounting mechanism as I’d hoped they’d be… and over time, the stepper motor tends to “sag” a bit, resulting in a bit too much friction between the motor, the coupler, and the underlying knob, causing the mechanism to stall out until someone manually goes and reseats it…
Involving MQTT and HA can sometimes get frustrating too; having your AC not working properly if there's a problem on a Linux machine can suck. If this becomes a problem in practice, iirc ESPHome also has a thermostat component, and temperature sensors are really cheap and easy to wire in, so you could do it all on the microcontroller pretty easily in a low-code way. But if this part is working, no need to mess with it.
That's what I did. Just an esp32 relay board with a tiny screen and a knob. Then I put more esp32 sensors in each room to get individual temps, with HA logic to select which room the thermostat pays attention to. If HA dies for some reason it falls back to a local control and I'm back to the same situation as before, a thermostat that only pays attention to the temperature in the hallway it's installed in. All the boards were flashed with ESPHome.
Nice. I don't have any ESPHome thermostats right now, but I have an ESPHome fridge/freezer temperature monitor. I adopted the same idea: it should integrate with HA when HA is available, but it should be useful even when HA is down. So in addition to exporting the raw temperature to HA, the alert threshold is kept on the device rather than in HA so it can locally compute the alert state. This triggers a directly wired piezo buzzer, in addition to an HA phone notification.
You do have to set the "api: reboot_timeout: 0" if you don't want it to reboot itself every 15 minutes while HA is down. I persisted the alert threshold to flash though so even if it does reboot it comes right back up and works fine.
It does feel hella jank, but it's pretty obvious from the tone of the text that the author is fully aware of that. He went through every available option in order from reasonable to jank and this is the first one that worked.
There's nothing wrong with jank as long as it's not going to burn your house down the way some of his other rejected ideas would have.
> Honestly, back when the 737 MAX debacle happened, a lot of consumers claimed that they would stop flying aircrafts if they ran into 737 MAXs. And I don't think it happened in enough numbers - or even enough to make news. Sales went through the roof, everything kept working.
Is this kind of consumer revolt even really possible?
If you feel strongly enough that you refuse to fly altogether, then of course you can avoid flying on a 737 MAX. But I think most people did not feel the risk was that high. They just want to select "guarantee no 737 MAX" when booking a flight, and as far as I can tell that option doesn't exist.
Even if the flight is not a 737 MAX when you book, they can and sometimes do change aircraft, and as far as I know there's no option to get your money back when they do. If you show up and see it's a 737 MAX...you either get on or you lose your money, and have to find some other way to get where you're going, right?
In 2013 there were approximately 24,000 737 flights per day[1] - likely more today. If narrowed to just the MAX variants, it's still thousands per day.
Two, albeit high profile, crashes out of all the daily MAX volume is simply not something to worry about - let alone influence your booking choices.
You're applying everyday casual risk analysis to the highly-regulated environment of commercial air transport, where the MAX crashes absolutely were out of the norm and well beyond accepted levels.
Bear in mind when the crashes occurred there were fewer than 100 MAX in service.
Until you are on the plane. Sorry, but reasonably people and countries expect zero crashes and any single crash is worth worrying about because shareholder money should not trump a single human life.
> In its statement, the SFPD notes that it adheres to a “strict policy” around drone use, and that “drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises.”
In principle I think this is good. These are useful tools as shown in the first video, helping them safely arrest a suspected thief. And having a policy like this is a good step to ensure they aren't used for ubiquitous surveillance that enables the sort of post-hoc warrantless (and unjustifiable) invasions of privacy we've seen with Flock cameras.
That said, I hope the official policy is more air-tight than this one-sentence version. "with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits" is tautological, only constraining the target to be a vehicle [edit: or does it require they follow a vehicle pursuit policy specified elsewhere? unclear to me]. And can anything be a "training exercise"? What would the consequences be anyway if an officer violates the policy? [edit: I'm also wondering now how tight their policy on an "active criminal investigation" is. When there's significant officer time involved, there's some inherent limit on how silly/vindictive/... they can get, but with enough drones, that could go away.]
Yea, "adheres to a strict policy" could mean anything. They have policies[1] posted publicly. I wonder if any of the footage will be found to violate their policies, and if so, what accountability looks like.
Nothing in this report indicates that policy was being broken.
There was a misconfiguration of the tool. They didn’t realize that the internal sharing link was publicly accessible.
I read ryandrake's comment as saying this accidental sharing is a rare opportunity for wired to audit actual video of (some) drone use, and they might yet review it more and find some drone use policy violation not obvious from flight logs alone. I agree that if that happens, it'd be very interesting to see how the violation is handled.
But since you brought it up, SFPD should also have a policy on when they share drone footage, and I'm going to assume they violated that. In this case I think it's reasonable to take them at their word that it was accidental and they are learning from it. And I'd be a lot more concerned anyway if it were ubiquitous surveillance of ordinary citizens, not just incidental captures during scoped, presumed legitimate operations.
I'd be interested to hear the author's answer to your question, but I see it as an interesting proof-of-concept. It's testing the viability of not only rewriting PostgreSQL in Rust (and their choice of deps) but also in switching the threading model and other architectural changes. LLMs shine at pumping out prototypes insanely fast, and a working prototype can put an end to a lot of speculation.
I likely wouldn't use a rewrite of such a huge project if it doesn't have the backing of the original team (or a significant fraction thereof) and a believable story for having matched/exceeded the original code quality and maintenance. I also think in general using an LLM for license-laundering is legally and morally hard to defend, although this case is different in that they chose a more restrictive license. Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that you can just download PostgreSQL, do s/MIT/AGPL/ and release it, legally. (The original MIT-licensed version still exists, so no reason anyone would prefer yours until you make another release with some compelling new feature.)
I'm joking...but not entirely. It sounds impressive on a promo packet when you say you've saved 100 TB of RAM / $$$ through whatever technique. But it sounds a lot less impressive when you say if this system grows to this size in x years, I will have saved 100 TB, especially when no one yet knows how large the system will really be in that time or what the cost of RAM will be. I dunno, maybe if you say that x years ago, I made a decision that now is saving us 100 TB, that's kinda impressive, but you're also getting credit for it x years after you did the work. It also doesn't have the implication that it must be inherently complex/hard because some other smart person chose the other way. And there is a bias to care more about recent accomplishments. So I don't really think it'd be valued the same at all.
Also, in general big tech (at least Google) prefers growing the userbase over improving efficiency. Periodically efficiency is rewarded, e.g. when RAM cost suddenly balloons or some big must-have feature has suddenly used up capacity planned for something else. You get rewarded for doing efficiency work on demand, not eagerly.
I once got a $100 peer bonus for finding 100,000 cores that were essentially stranded by an accounting error in another team's migration script.
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