Management: Gee whiz, we really have no idea how to gauge productivity to decide who gets promoted. We could manage. Or, better, we could just have someone write a script that pulls info from git on how many lines of code each person has written.

Programmers:

I’ll give that a try next time!

DHH with a pants-on-head stupid argument just because he hates the big players in tech? Must be a day ending in Y again.

My cat Luna died five years ago next week. She was the best cat that ever existed and there’s still a hole in my heart.

:(

The data is interesting. But this is a really poorly constructed graph.

No. Never. It takes whole teams of people to get it right. (Even then, they sometimes get it wrong.)

That’s a false dichotomy if I’ve ever heard one, dude.

No, just follow the money. It’s all going into marketing. Ban marketing (like the rest of the world!) and prices drop overnight.

There is exactly one easiest option: be like the rest of the civilized world and ban consumer marketing of medicine. HUGE amounts of the prices of drugs are just down to TV ads. “Ask your doctor about…” is horse shit, let your doctor decide what prescription drugs you need. And fire the cocaine-riddled, law-breaking marketing departments that soak up so much money.

“Our recipes are consistent, like a good espresso maker.”

“Okay cool, how do you know that?”

“So many questions! We’re hackers! We are very smart.”

That’s the thing. They have no way of even knowing if they messed up! I’m not even sure the way they could be messing up is a thing they know they should be worried about.

I’m not disputing the reasoning behind why this is important. But “it is important” does not imply that their solution is the right one.

People make illicit drugs chock full of impurities all the time too, and it fucks people up.

There are standards for purity on pharmaceuticals. Impurities have to be ridiculously low. Lower than you can measure in your garage.

These dudes either don’t know you need to even measure purity or have decided that it’s inconvenient and are ignoring it.

I’m a process chemist. I do this sort of thing for a living.

These guys don’t even know why what they’re suggesting is so dangerous. Do not do any of this.

I feel bad for laughing at this

The drinking is for when you have to make the mods work together without the game dying a slow horrible death, followed by a rather quick also horrible death

The small beings are being brought to the slender building of magic!

Plastic that’s got a lot of color (especially black) is very, very hard to recycle. Getting the color out so you can make like-new, colorless plastic makes the economics pretty much impossible.

Should recycled plastic that isn’t colorless be accepted? Yep. But basically every manufacturer that uses recycled plastic only accepts colorless stuff. Even if they’re going to turn around and dump a bunch of pigment and dye into it! (Or especially if they’re going to do that. They have specific color targets.)

So, for now, if you buy something that’s made from recycled plastic but isn’t clear and colorless, that plastic is now outside of the recycle-able ecosystem. It’s a bummer.

But there are ways to get around that coming online. One is to turn the plastic polymers back into monomers (the building block molecules). It’s sometimes easier to separate out the pigments and dyes once you have a chemical soup of monomers instead of a block of plastic. Then you take the purified monomers and repolymerize them. Bam, you have recycled plastic that’s nearly indistinguishable from new.

I worked on a chemical recycling / depolymerization project for a couple of years. That tech is currently being scaled up into a big plant that’ll actually churn out like-new plastic from really crappy input material. Pretty exciting stuff. (As long as the business and engineering guys running the project now don’t ruin it.)

1. Hack together a proof of concept
2. Works well enough that management slaps a “done” sticker on it
3. Pile of hacks becomes load bearing
4. One or two dependencies change, the whole thing falls over
5. Set evenings and weekends on fire to fix it
6. Management brags about moving fast and breaking things, engineers quit and become cabbage farmers and woodworkers
7. New graduates are hired, GOTO 1

Anything you do while touching the trackpad with one finger at a time is the same as though you were using a mouse. Tap once to select, tap and drag to move, double tap to open.

If you tap with two fingers on the pad at the same time, it reacts as if you’ve right-clicked. I usually use my index and middle finger.