Ironically, most technology is the opposite. At least when you’re designing and developing things, it’s all individuals - you can have assistants or small teams, but institutions don’t invent new things, individuals do.

I don’t mean that pedantically, I mean one or two people were the driving force behind near every innovation. A company can sit those people in a room and fund them for a decade, but you have to keep them happy and leave them alone - if they leave or they’re meddled with too much, you’re back to square one

Big companies can’t innovate (except in monetization)… It’s all done by start ups now. Then they get acquired, and all progress halts

Just makes me think, in science (or academia at least) researchers are tied to their research to maintain their position, rather than their position deciding their research. It’s still a pretty broken system, but between that and the incentive for open collaboration it just makes me think. If every piece of technology was open sourced, if everyone from phone manufacturers to game designers existed in a world where designs could be improved upon, where would we be now?

Interestingly, it’s looking more and more like evolution isn’t random, and not only is evolution happy with “good enough”, it seems like it actively stops there

Based on some recent experiments with bacteria and editing out existing genes, it seems like it chooses one genetic area at a time, and once it makes a marginal increase in an area it switches to another

It’s possibly a mechanism to avoid a population boom then bust - if you improve too much too fast, you’ll outcompete your environment to the point you destroy your own ecological niche

However it works (and figuring that out is bleeding edge research), it’s very old. Interestingly, Darwin’s later (unpublished) writings went in this direction, but the theories lost out to the random mutation theory

Herbivores eat a lot more meat than we’re led to believe. Horses and cows will eat mice and bugs if they get the chance, and just about any animal will happily eat an egg they stumble across

The bird in the picture also has a raptor’s break, so whatever it is it’s likely a predator

People used to make fun of me all the time for sniffing and saying “smells like it’s going to rain soon”. Couldn’t even tell you what it smells like… It just smells like the concept of it starting to rain

I’ve met others who knew exactly what I was talking about, but not many

It’s quite possible, although I’m inclined to blame it on turnover and pressures for deadlines

I’ve come to see software kinda like a plant. If you neglect it, it rots, because all software is contextual and the world moves on. If you keep growing it, it starts to rot from the inside. If you carve out down to something smooth and streamlined, it can last a long time and just need TLC to bounce back

Ultimately, if you want something to be big and to last, you have to prune it, transplant it, and continuously work on it. There’s no direct money to be made there though

And it helps a shit ton to have people around long-term. It can take years to learn a big stack, but having someone go “wait, if we do this we need to rexamine how we delete photos” is how you avoid fuck ups like this

In our current economic system? Absolutely, declining population is a huge problem.

As far as physics? The world doesn’t care about imaginary human numbers. Production continues to soar through the roof

We made all of this up. At any point, we could say “hey, this is a dumb game that’s making people suffer, let’s figure out something else”

That title is amazing

I feel like I’ve been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like “yeah, maybe it’s gotten a bit worse? Haven’t really noticed”

My digital friends are way more willing to accommodate my bullshit

I think long messages are a good habit. Start with something readable in the history, past that who cares? Most people rarely read past the preview, and if they do they want details

I think it’s great because it makes you reflect on what the goal was and what you did. I sometimes stop to make a quick change as I’m writing, or just collect my thoughts before mentally dismissing the task

Do you have any plans to open source your coffee list? I want to add this feature where I get an iced coffee in the morning

Added zip code to the reseller portal when batch-creating transactions in <main-project>

I try to start off descriptive, in case I want to diff a few changes back. After that, sometimes I write notes or general reflections on life in there… Until yesterday I thought no one was reading them

This is exactly why HR departments exist. Had OP collected evidence, told management with a paper trail, and they failed to stop it? Or worse, told off OP because they don’t want to deal with it?

The jerk could maybe get charged with a misdemeanor related to harassment or misuse of technology… Maybe the UK has something harsher or more specific, but at the end of the day it’s a bit extreme to put someone in jail or pay OPs wages if they were forced out of work

The company on the other hand? They have a legal obligation to maintain a safe work environment. They also have deeper, easier to access pockets. A lot easier to get a lawyer to pursue that, which is expensive even if they win in the end

If they’re clearly shown to have not taken reasonable action, they’d at least be on the hook for any lost wages or medical costs (not sure what decent therapy runs over there, less than the US I’m sure but I’m guessing not cheap). Even if OP quits or decides not to show up, it could be until they get a new job at similar pay with some extra thrown on top

HR’s job is to cut this off before OP needs to be paid off, or much worse finds a lawyer. They don’t care about the employees, so safest could be to fire the guy - the least they’re going to do is officially reprimand the guy and follow up with OP to make sure it’s not worsening and OP isn’t feeling litigious

I always wondered… So in theory trackers are harmless. But for a bird? They’re freaking huge. Birds fold their legs up tight to sleep. It’s a small fraction of their body weight on one side, all the time, for months or years… That can’t just be a minor inconvenience

It’s got to be like wearing a work boot on one foot and a tennis shoe on the other every day

You too

I really have no idea why you’re acting like this is a common argument people get into…

This is a very old and organic tradition you’re criticizing as an outsider. It’s given by the community as a person’s contributions change into a legacy that will inspire new generations and ingrain respect for the shoulders you stand on

Without understanding the what and why, you’re arguing against a cultural practice in the scientific community. I’m trying to give you context, and you keep trying to poke holes instead of trying to understand

Einstein didn’t lay the foundation for the technology, he laid the foundation for the standard model. We call him the father of modern physics. He made the math work, the bomb was already being developed by the Germans. He didn’t come up with the idea, he didn’t come up with the technology, he just consulted.

Oppenheimer built and led the team that built the bomb. The theories weren’t complete, the technology didn’t exist, no one had laid out an equation that enabled the technology - they did all that in the Manhattan project.

Every person called the father or mother of <field of science> is a hero, in both the literary and personal sense. They represent looking at something in a new way - their name is an embodiment of a certain way of thinking.

You took a shot at that for no reason

What I mean is if you don’t slice time into slots, you’re not using time slicing. It doesn’t make sense to talk about time slicing at all anymore

Two devices can transmit at the same time with all sorts of setups, even on the same frequency. And it’s not inaccurate to describe time slicing as “a method to allow multiple devices to transmit and receive simultaneously”

The question isn’t valid. Being truly pedantic would be pointing out that any number of devices can transmit at the same time, you didn’t say the messages would be received

They also lay the eggs from needlessly higher than necessary, so that they might crack one of existing eggs while their at it

From a human perspective, yes, that’s exactly what it does

If you want to get pedantic about the technical details, it’s not time splitting if you’re not splitting the time…