I could never be a programmer. All of their tools are really pretty terrible except for a very few, and the documentation is beyond terrible. Just inexcusably bad for nearly everything.
By comparison, enterprise toolkits for infrastructure are often by comparison well-documented and very discoverable, though often no less complex below the surface.
🗣️Special licensure requirements for drivers of large trucks SUVs and super high-horsepower cars, especially if they drive in major cities.
— Angie Schmitt 🚶♀️🚴♀️ 🚌 (@schmangee) January 30, 2020
I’m fine with this. I drive a car with 415 horsepower. One of the main reasons is because a high-HP car has much, much better brakes than the average car. There is usually no way to get such excellent brakes on a regular car, even as an aftermarket part — they simply won’t fit. My car is safer than most similar cars for just this reason.
My car can stop from 60mph to 0 in around 108 feet. The average large SUV is going to need at least 135 feet. The Toyota Camry takes 126 feet.
I think people who have never driven a car like mine don’t realize how much of a superpower having really great brakes is. I’d sooner give up the horsepower than the brakes. And it’s not just stopping distance — there is no fade, they don’t easily overheat, water doesn’t impede them as much, and they do exactly what I want them to, every single time. By comparison, using the brakes of a regular car feels like near-suicide.
What goes through people’s minds when they charge at someone carrying a baby with their car?
— Angie Schmitt 🚶♀️🚴♀️ 🚌 (@schmangee) January 31, 2020
Maybe “Babies count for double points!”
I earned my CISSP for two reasons. The first was that I wanted to know more about security and that’s the way the industry is moving. Coequal with that it’s prestigious enough that even people with PhDs throw it up after their name:
Will never have a PhD, so the CISSP will have to do.
Spite is—and I mean this sincerely—an excellent motivator.
My PhD is for my 5th grade teacher who accused me of cheating on spelling tests and told me that considering how I acted, it was no wonder I didn’t have any friends.— Dr. Krista Benson (@klinb) January 26, 2020
At least some of my success is due to my sixth grade teacher, who told me that though I might be smart, I was lazy and would never amount to anything.
This is after I refused to turn in her busywork assignments.
Fuckin’ CTO, Mrs. Morgan, you bitter old beldam.
It amazes me that Alf was a real TV show that people used to watch on purpose.
My grandmother watched it.
If a restaurant has artificial plants, the food will be crap.
— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) January 29, 2020
Usually true!
But with a big exception. False for barbecue places in the South. There, the worse the decor, preferably from the 1980s or 1990s and never updated, the better the food. In fact, the best barbecue is often purchased from a battered smoker in an abandoned K-Mart parking lot from someone who doesn’t look like they’ve bathed in the past year or so. You see that, you pull over, you buy some. It’ll be the best barbecue you’ve ever tasted.
Basically, the current US social compact on serious mental illness is this: we leave the seriously mentally ill to catch as catch can on the streets — until they get in trouble, at which point we put them in prison, often in solitary confinement.
It is monstrous. https://t.co/O6Y9TudxRG
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) January 29, 2020
There are numerous vagrants who roam around near my office. About 90% of them appear to be mentally ill. This is not good for them and not good for society. We are monstrously and unnecessarily cruel in so many areas — and the really astounding part is that it doesn’t even save any money, which was and is the stated goal.
Someone should study how I take tests. I can often pass or nearly pass tests on topics that I know little to nothing about by understanding how tests are made and using clues in the tests to pass them — particularly if I can go back and review anything*. The thing is, I am not sure that it’s a skill that can be taught, even if it’s a skill one can possess.
It’s harder to do this on tests that aren’t multiple choice — but not impossible. The strategy just changes a bit. Test-taking like I do it is probably not something anyone can learn because it depends on having a huge base of already-extant knowledge, a good understanding of what kinds of questions get asked on exams and why they are asked, and having a large working memory that is able to quickly assimilate and associate facts and information one has just learned moments before.
So…good luck teaching that.
*Some certification exams, like the CISSP, do not allow returning to questions for just this reason.
Some students are quiet not because they’re unengaged or unprepared but because they value the discussion so much that they’re willing to contribute only their most urgent and fully thought-out ideas.
It’s taken me, a talkative person, a long time to realize that.
— Jason Pearl (@jasoninmia) January 28, 2020
In person, except with my very closest friends, I generally don’t say anything unless these two conditions are met:
1) I am 99% sure what I am saying is correct.
2) I can back up my argument with facts and citations.
Otherwise, why bother making mouth noises when you don’t know something? It just wastes everyone’s time and harms the more gullible.
The threat of AI is both overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term.
Seems a very common human failing.
The iPads Pro outperform MacBooks computationally. They’re thin, light, reliable, gorgeous, and yet despite their impressive computational performance they need no fans.
Software is where the iPad has gotten lost.
Other than servers, my iPad Pro is probably the fastest computer I currently own. And yet the above is exactly right. The hardware is excellent. The software is barely acceptable to bad. Apple is trying to both cater to clueless droolers and “pros.” This simply cannot work.
Droolers as a demographic are not capable of learning much or doing much with their computing devices; most cannot even find and click a single button reliably. This is about 80-90% of computer users. The iPad Pro, therefore, should truly be aimed at users who can multi-task, can make use of a real file system, can understand abstraction and don’t need an interface a chimp would be comfortable with.
That’s the iPad Pro I want and need but that Apple will probably never make.
Great essay that actually attempts to think about and grapple with a topic rather than dispense high-handed liberal sureties that proclaim some absolute morality which we’ve all inevitably offended.
The best essay I’ve read so far in 2020.
It’s Hashtags time! Take a book title and add one word to change the meaning, and tag it with #AddAWordRuinABook. Could be on the show!
— jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) January 28, 2020
The Old Man and the Sea Monkeys
The Taco Bell Jar
The Heart Is a Lonely MILF Hunter
Finnegans Wakeboard
War and Peace Out
me on a team meeting at work: "you cannot explain to a 45 year old bureaucrat that two mouse clicks are enough extra friction to cause an entire team to stop doing a specific job duty forever, even though it's the truth"
— Gravis (edited) (@gravislizard) January 28, 2020
MBA thinking. Many users can’t find their Start menu in Windows after using the same OS series for two decades. They absolutely are not going to to do two extra clicks. Many of them, it’ll take two months of training to explain how to do those two extra clicks.
If you think I am exaggerating, that just means you have never been on help desk.