The majority of technologies that power the internet were developed in the 80s and refined in the 90s. Everything since then is built as a layer of abstraction on top of those core technologies.
Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.
Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.
Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.
Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?
We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.
And Mozilla is largely funded by Google. We all just hope they don’t pull the rug from them but I have no faith that our inept, slow government would stop that from happening before it’s too late.
Almost certainly the entire reason Google is funding Mozilla is to try and stave off antitrust lawsuits.
The official reason is so that Big G is the default search engine on every install.
But that may very well just be a smokescreen.
Yep.
Google will spend more on a legal team working out how to prevent the lawsuits in the first place than they would be giving to Mozilla
I think this reason is stupid. Why can’t there be a duopoly in the browser market like in the phone market? Even if there is no firefox, there will still be safari on its own engine
I think the phone market should also be broken up.
The reason a doupoly is bad in any market is that it’s essentially next to no choice for the consumer, and the businesses can force changes to the market that are anti-consumer with little reprocussion. In any given market the minimum number of legitimate competitors necessary for meaningful competition will be different, but even three is too few in the web browser game, especially when the market shares look like this.
That’s why I’m rooting for Ladybird.
I find it kinda ironic that they communicate over Discord, but it looks interesting
I appreciate you making me aware of such an amazing project.
But nntpd is still out there. Rebuilding Usenet will suck. But it’s not impossible. Start from the net2 sites again.
Old mail RFCs included an instant message channel. I’m sure I saw code in either sendmail or uw-imap for it too.
I like the fediverse, but the old ways are still valid for their particular payload.
for chat there’s IRC or bit more modern XMPP.
Usenet:
Edit: I’m talking about step 3
aka Enshittification
The key word is “majority”. I think IPFS will gain more popularity moving forward especially if fascism and censorship continue to rise.
And IPFS is not build on 90s tech?
Also compared to TOR, IPFS has 0 censorship resiliance.
I was a bit exmited for IPFS for a moment, but th more i tried it and thought about it, the less I saw a reason to use it.
An example of the flip side? Something built on the newest technology from the bottom up?
If you value your privacy and you have a choice between using a browser to access a service vs installing their app, use the browser.
Online services can get much more information about you through an app vs the browser. Browsers are generally locked down more. Apps in general have access to much more information from your device.
The interview is a vibe check first and foremost. If you vibe with the team we will overlook other things in your application. If you made it to interview, we already think you’re good enough so don’t stress trying to impress or apologize.
Managers are mostly people who get tired of watching other people do things badly and decide to try to do better. You don’t need a special degree or any magic to be a good manager, you should like people though.
Everyone is faking it to some degree.
The „you have to like people“ part took me nearly 20 years to figure out. I hate people in general with possible remedy for people who are nice. I‘m exceptional at managing people, I just dont vibe with them. This leads to absurd situations where everyone is happy, professionally but folks just hate my guts.
So, I now work alone and am happy with it. :)
As a fellow non people person, god I wish I was part of your team!
God I wish I was part of your team
As a fellow non people person
Press X to doubt.
If people hate your guts chances are you’re not a good manager.
I actually am genuinely interested in that fellow’s reasoning behind believing both that his job of managing people is successful, and also that all the people he managed do not like being managed by him.
Anecdotally, I have encountered workplaces containing a manager or employee that was universally disliked, and it was never because they were doing an awesome job. They did appear to think that people disliked them personally but benefited from their results. Often they seem to also believe those results would be unachievable in ways that do not produce the distaste. I am not sure these contradictions are entirely defensible.
people are generally ok. put them in a situation where they can climb over other people to advance and watch the rot begin.
so, while people are generally ok, corporate people are generally not.
Or any business, not even corporate.
You see the same crap in SMB.
Super Mario Bros?
Small/Medium-sized Business
Personality, presence and confidence
Natural self confidence, but NOT an arrogant selfish confidence.
Some people naturally have confidence and presence and some people need to build it as a skill.
I know guys and gals with little to no knowledge or skill build up careers because they just knew how to talk and connect to people.
I also know guys and gals with years of education and degrees but have little to no way of politely or easily getting along with people.
Everyone is faking it to some degree.
Most valuable lesson I was ever forced to learn.
Can confirm with a very condensed anecdote: I once applied for a job that required engineering degree in electronics or mechanics. I’m a hischool dropout. Interview went well, and I got a job offer a month later. I got the impression that they were more interested in the right type of person with relevant hands-on experience, and in my case that experience meant IT/Linux (I was always a hobbyist geek)and being used to operating heavy machinery (Grew up on a farm).
I’m still in the same industry, and I earn more than my friends with masters degrees.
Former process engineer in an aluminum factory. Aluminum foil is only shiny on one side and duller on the other for process reasons, not for any “turn this part towards baking, etc” reasons.
It’s just easier to double it on itself and machine it to double thickness than it is to hit single thickness precision, especially given how much more tensile strength it gives it.
Also, our QA lab did all kinds of tests on it to settle arguments. The amount of heat reflected/absorbed between the two sides is trivially small. But if you like one side better you should wrap it that way, for sure!
There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.
That’s where you need people like me who give a fuck about nothing but customer experience and if my employer manages to make a buck, good for them. My employer is generally just a middle man who siphons money out of both our pockets. And makes me fill out a second, useless timesheet while you’re paying me to work.
Jokes on me though because I’ve been out of work for 3 months, so take my suggestion of fuck your employer with a grain of salt.
If they do a bad enough job they’ll create a niche for a competitor to fill.
That’s a dream. The googles and such just buy them out and shut them down. There is always a bigger fish that spends more money preserving the status quo than making a product.
True - that’s a big reason I like open source software. Doesn’t help with search though.
I would love to see exactly how many people dropped Adobe after the latest drama, I would bet it would look exactly like the Netflix micro dip after shutting down password sharing.
No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.
Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.
I have a laptop where half the keyboard doesn’t work and the mouse gave out, but my full paid Acrobat works, so I keep it.
That’s why a lot of us are here after all.
That is true for outsourcing companies, but not true for product companies usually.
I think it’s equally true for product companies. Do you know how hard it is to get a company to prioritize bug fixing over feature work? Shy of a user revolt, or a friend of the CEO reporting an issue, bugs are almost always second priority or lower.
I’d say this strongly depends on the industry.
In an entertainment or ad sales product, I’d completely agree with you.
In a medical or financial product, the bug will take precedence.
Medical? Your funny. Healthcare software is the worst. There is a reason the stuff that matters is decades old. Cause the new stuff rarely works. And the rest… tell me again why I have to fill out the same forms year after year, and they never populate with my previous answers? Or why I have to tell them my 2 year old son isn’t menstruating or hasn’t stolen a car yet (on the same form no less). The software is so hard to use the providers have given up.
You wish it was like that in the medical industry, but it absolutely is not
I work in the medical industry. Any software that controls any device or reports any data used in the OR is absolutely treated this way.
Not in my experience. Unless maybe if it causes loss of funds or other security issues, which usually get a fair response.
But not at the software companies that require monthly subscriptions, right? They get money every month, so they have lots of incentive to fix all the bugs. Right? … Right? /s
depends on how bad and widespread the bug is. Also if there are just to many they will do a bug squashing program increment. at least places I have worked have.
No idea what you are talking about. Product companies are exactly what I am referring to. Some director signs off on the purchase, probably has never even seen the software. But he has seen the sales pitch. That is what the C suite of small companies are for, mingling with the decision makers.
I mean that describes most things. For example, if I worked for a dentist to make oral braces for people, that doesn’t mean I myself am going to ever need or use them.
No… the decision maker on the purchase is the user in that case. For software, the decision maker is almost always someone who won’t use it. Like ticket tracking software. The people filing the tickets, and the people responding are not the people who decided which ticket tracking software to buy.
This is why Dog Fooding is important.
Found the Sonos employee.
Sonos has pissed me off. After the latest update, the app cannot locate the speakers in any of my rooms. The TV speakers still work with a signal from the TV, but the speakers in all other rooms basically cannot be used.
I’ve factory reset them, set them up in the app, and as soon as that is done, they disappear from the app again.
They worked fine for years, then this bullshit. I’m researching a home theater setup that doesn’t use Sonos and am planning on selling it all once I’ve found replacements.
It feels like I don’t own the very expensive hardware that I have bought. I guess since they are software controlled, I really dont.
I don’t really get this point. Of course there’s a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there’s a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.
Of course there are cases in which there’s a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it’s not like that applies to all software.
Software just has to be good enough that people put up with it. Once you get users on the system, you make it difficult to move your data out which acts as a lock in mechanism. The company that can make a minimally usable product that people are willing to put up with will typically beat one making a really good product that takes longer to get to market.
To wit, WorkDay is universally regarded as trash. But companies keep writing checks, so employees on both sides of the time clock have to keep tolerating it
Another aspect of the problem is that people making the decision of what programs to use don’t actually have to use them.
As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.
“I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”
“Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”
“See above, and prioritise things that matter.”
yup
This is what I’ve seen too. Directors come back from a conference and suddenly we’re learning a newer but objectively worse system. Obviously the grunts using the systems aren’t consulted, but are expected to be team players through this educational experience.
When the buyer isn’t the user (which is most of the time), no there isn’t. Competitors try to win with great sounding features and other marketing BS because that is all the director will see. The users are then left with the product that has all the bells and whistles, but is terrible at doing what actually needs to be done. And the competition is the same, so they don’t really have much choice. Bell’s and whistles are cheaper than making it work well.
So you’re talking about SaaS / business tooling then? Again though, that’s just one of many segments of software, which was my point.
Also, even in that market it’s just not true to say that there’s no incentive for it to work well. If some new business tool gets deployed and the workforce has problems with it to the point of measurable inefficiency, of course that can lead to a different tool being chosen. It’s even pretty common practice for large companies to reach out to previous users of a given product through consultancy networks or whatever to assess viability before committing to anything.
Nor necessarily SaaS, but yes business tooling. Which is the vast majority of software if you include software businesses buy and make thier customers use. The incentive is for it to work, not for it to work well. The person who signed off on the purchase either will never know how bad it is because they don’t use it and are insulated by other staff from feedback, or because they are incentivesed to downplay and ignore complaints to make thier decision look good at their level in the company.
I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms
The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.
They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.
Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier
Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.
I mean, no? If you are at a SaaS company the software working well is the most important aspect. Loss of quality leads to loss of subscribers.
Subscribers? 90 some odd % of SaaS is sold to businesses, not individuals.
And if the business needs aren’t met, said businesses will go to another SaaS company that promises them a better, brighter future.
The user might not be the subscriber, but the user being less productive because the software is getting in their way, will irritate the subscriber.
I know a SaaS company that put thousands upon thousands of engineering hours into making small (and sometimes large) optimizations over their overall crappy architecture so their enterprise customers (and I’m talking ~6 out of the top 10 largest companies in one industry in the US) wouldn’t leave them for a solution that doesn’t freeze up for all users in a company when one user runs a report. Each company ran in a silo of their own, but for the bigger ones… I’m not going to give exact numbers, but if you give every user a total of half an hour of unnecessary delays per day, that’s like 500 hours of wasted time per day per 1000 employees. Said employees were performing extremely overpriced services, so 500 hours of wasted time per day might be something like 100k income lost per day. Not an insignificant number even for billion dollar companies.
I’ve since left the company for greener pastures and I hear the new management sucks, but the old one for sure knew that they were going to lose their huge ass clients over performance issues and bugs.
The key phrase was work well. You are saying they have a motive for it to work. Like not freeze up. I am saying they have no motive for it to work well. As in be user friendly or efficient or easy to use.
Ok, well really splitting hairs on what “working well” means but ok. Why do UX designers exist? I mean if you have a bad UI that takes a user 10 min to do something that can be done in 10 seconds in another solution, you lose. Time is money. Anyone who has ever been in magament knows it’s all about cost vs output. If a call center employee can handle 2x more cases with another solution due to a better UX, they will move to that.
You are saying efficiency doesn’t matter, which is just %100 false. A more efficient solution makes/saves more money. It saves time, which is also money and improves agility of the team. How can you say with a straight face that a business doesn’t care about efficiency of it’s workers…
Because I have worked with software for 30 years. When the employee is salaried, thier time costs nothing. I will say I have no experience with call centers. So those may be an exception. I believe the majority of computer use jobs are salary though.
Ugh, wrong again. Time is money. People have limited bandwidth and output, you want to get at much output as you can for the salary spend while realizing each person has a finite output. You keep saying things like “time costs nothing” and “quality doesn’t matter” which are just completely wrong and if true would upend the industry.
Also I’ve been in software for just over 20, the last 4 of those as a CTO. Since you seem to keep bringing up your credentials for some reason.
It still worked - you could use the software with occasional hiccups, it’s not like there was data loss or anything. It just didn’t work WELL.
Yah, clients are subscribers
Okay then the users aren’t subscribers, thier boss or the boss above that are. And that person doesn’t really care how hard it is to use. They care about the presentation they gave to other leadership about all the great features the software has. And if they drop it now, they look like a fool, so deal with it.
They do care, %100 they care. If you take longer to do task X because the SaaS solution crashes or is unavailable, or causes issues in finance, or a dozen other things then the company will very much care. I literally work at a SaaS company and hear complaints from clients. Money is all that matters, if your solution isn’t as good at making/saving them money as another solution, you get dropped. And reliability is a big part of that. A solution that frequently has issues is not a money-making/saving system that can be relied on.
It’s not about looking like a fool; it’s about what your P&L looks like. That’s what actually matters. Say you made a nice slide deck about product X and got buy-in. Walking that back is MUCH easier to do than having to justify a hit to your P&L.
What experience do you have to be making these claims?
I have 30 years of work experience on both sides of the equation with companies of varying size. Once a company gets to somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees, the 2nd level managment starts to attract professionally ambitious people who prioritize thier career over the work to a more a more extreme degree. They never walk anything back. Every few years they will often replace a solution (even a working one) so that they can take credit for a major change. Anyway, you get enough of these and they start to back each other and squeeze out anyone who cares about the work. I have been told in one position that it doesn’t matter if you are right, you don’t say anything negative about person X’s plan. And many other people from other companies and such have echoed that over the years. Now small companies often avoid this. But most software targets the big companies for the big paydays. Of the ones I have worked at, some even openly admitted that financially they couldn’t justify fixing a user issue over a new feature that might sell more product because the user issues don’t often lead to churn, where as new features often seal a deal.
You seem to be basing how the entire industry works on some people you’ve encountered who want to climb the ladder. Again, when you stand in front of a board and have to justify your EBITDA, it doesn’t matter how good your PowerPoint slide was. They don’t have to walk it back, the P&L is numbers, they have to justify those numbers or deal with not hitting budget. A company runs off numbers not initiatives people want to push.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that you have to report metrics to investors. Spend, rev, output, etc. And a poor SaaS solution that has poor quality negatively impacts those numbers. Numbers don’t lie, no matter how much spin you put on them. You say you have 30 years of experience both consuming and delivering SaaS solutions but seem to ignore that you have defended your P&L and your performance, all numbers, not office politics. Investors only care about money, dollars and cents, numbers. So what happens when solution X that Bob pushed and no one can talk bad about tanks your topline, or your EBITDA? Then what? You tell the board not to say anything bad about it? That just doesn’t make sense.
Depends on business model. Saas - quality is very important. Non-profit insurance/bureaucratic type - they’ll burn millions to hire plenty of QA then treat them like shit, ignore them, and push trash software all day
Quality is meaningless in SaaS. Only features matter.
Yeah no. Performance, reliability, uptime are huge.
Uptime isn’t quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user.
Uptime is quality. It’s why uptime is in SLAs. A quality product isn’t down half the time.
Opinions like that are why software quality sucks. And why using software is so painful for most people. “I have to use a stroller to set my phone number on the UI.” “Sure, but uptime if 5 9’s, so it’s quality software”.
Lol, saying uptime is needed for quality of why software quality sucks? What? Uptime is part of quality, it is not the sole determination of quality. You seem to be purposefully misunderstanding that concept.
False. Have a 70% up time and let me know how many clients you have left.
Uptime isn’t quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user
Uptime indicates reliability. Reliability is a factor of quality. A quality product has a high uptime. What good is a solution that doesn’t work 20% of the time? That’s exactly how you lose clients. Why do SLAs cover topics like five 9s uptime if they don’t matter and can be faked? This makes no sense.
You said quality doesn’t matter, only features. Ok, what happens when those features only work 10% of the time? It doesn’t matter as long as it has the feature? This is nonsense. I mean why does QA even exist then, what is the point of wasting spend on a team that only worries about quality, they are literally called Quality Assurance. Why do companies have those if quality doesn’t matter, why not just hire more eng to pump out features. Again, this makes no sense. Anyone who works in software would know the role of QA and why it’s important. You claim to work in tech, but seem to not understand the value of QA which makes me suspicious, that or you’ve just been a frontline dev and never had to worry about these aspects of management and the entire SDLC. I mean why is tracking defects a norm in software dev if quality doesn’t matter? Your whole stance just makes no sense.
It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user
No it’s not trival. What if “not working well” means you can’t save or type? Not working well means not working as intended, which means it does not satisfy the need that it was built to fill. You can have the feature to save, but if it only works half the time then according to you that’s fine. You might lose your work, but the feature is there, who cares about the quality of the feature… If it only saves sometimes or corrupts your file, those are just quality issues that no one cares about, they are “trivial?”
See, you just set the bar so low. Being able to save isn’t working well, it’s just working. And I have held the title of QA in the past. It is in part how I know these things. And in the last 5 years or so, companies have been laying off QAs and telling devs to do the job. Real QA is hard. If it really mattered you would have multiple QA people per dev. But the ratio is always the other way. A QA can’t test the new feature and make sure ALL the old ones still work at the rate a dev can turn out code. Even keeping up on features 1 to 1 would be really challenging. We have automation to try and keep up with the old features, but that needs to be maintained as well. QA is always a case of good enough. And just like at Boeing, managment will discourage QAs from reporting everything they find that is wrong. Because they don’t want a paper trail of them closing the ticket as won’t be fixed. I’ve been to QA conferences and listened to plenty of seasoned QAs talk about the art of knowing what to report and what not to. And how to focus effort on what management will actually ok to get fixed. It’s a whole art for a reason. I was encouraged to shift out of that profession because my skills would get much better pay, and more stable jobs, in dev ops. And my job is sufficiently obscure to most management that I can actually care about the users of what I write more. But also I get to see more metrics that show how the software fails it’s users while still selling. I have even been asked to produce metrics that would misrepresent the how well the software works for use in upper level meetings. And I have heard many others say the same. Some have said that is even a requirement to be a principle engineer in bigger companies. Which is why I won’t take those jobs. The “good enough” I am witness/part of is bad enough, I don’t want to increase it anymore.
I’m setting a new low sure, and you’re moving the goal posts. What “well” means is incredibly subjective.
You worked in QA, cool, and I’ve manage the entire R&D org of a nation wide company, including all of QA.
Your saying that since companies don’t invest in it enough it doesn’t matter at all? Why do they even invest at all then, if it truly doesn’t matter.
Yes a QA can test old features and keep up with new ones. WTF, have you never heard of a regression test suite? And you worked in QA? ok. Maybe acknowledging AQA is an entire field might solve that already solved problem.
You did a whole lot of complaining and non relevant stories but never answered any questions I’ve been asking you across multiple comments…
The cost of digital advertising cannot be justified by its effectiveness (or rather lack there of). We’ve collectively spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating the infrastructure for invasive hyper targeted ads that do not get better results than simple billboards and terrestrial TV ads even now. We’ve created a global economy of marketing, media, advertising and sales solely reliant on technofeudalist overlords who’ve provided very little actual improvement of anything.
The use of chatgpt for writing is so widespread in higher ed, it will cause serious problems to those students when entering the workforce.
Lots of fancy stuff is written about how we just have to change the way we teach!, and how we can use chatgpt in lessons! blablabla, but it’s all ignorant of the fact that some things need to be learnt by doing them, and students can’t understand how they hurt their own learning, because they don’t know what they don’t know.
The world is littered with fake empty buildings used to obscure phone line junctions and internet provider stuff.
Almost every neighbourhood has one. But they look like normal houses, so you can never tell unless you know where to look for.
Chocolate production is infested with slave labor, child labor and child slave labor.
i don’t think this is a secret anymore though
I used to think that at least the parts that are Fairtrade wouldn’t be affected as much.
So is banana production. And here I am with a bowl of banana-topped chocolate ice cream. Dammit.
Chunky Monkey by any means necessary
Hehehe. That’s just plain mean.
So what are you gonna do to stop it? 🍫🍌
I alone cannot stop it if that’s what you mean. In fact, often the reverse course of action seems the best. But I try to think forwardly and would stand up for what’s right even when I’m alone in doing so.
Not trying to be offensive, but could you provide examples of your second point? 😉☝🏻
The part about me standing up for what’s right?
If I’m not mistaken Nestlé, the firm that makes various brands of chocolate, are known or at least have been known to include slavery in really poor parts of the world.
When I look at a bottle or a cuddly packaged bit of chocolate, I shudder to think the shit conditions that a person, a child even was forced or on crap pay to produce that from the cocoa farming…
Ne*tle also does this thing where they lie to mothers in ‘third-world countries’ (I hate that term but can’t think of a better one rn) by telling them that their baby formula is better than actual milk, then give them some, which the mothers mix with dirty water, and when they can’t afford the formula, they’ll just give the babies plain dirty water.
An important part of that process that needs mentioning is that when the mothers are convinced by Nestle to feed their babies formula instead of their breast milk, their bodies will stop producing the milk before the baby is weaned from it.
So Nestle literally endangers babies’ lives just to sell more baby formula.
That’s an important addition!
Nestle also fucks up entire cities water supplies.
Glad i basically dont eat the stuff ever.
Building HVAC engineering (equipment sizing, ducting design, etc.) has been largely handwavy bullshit for a very long time and only recently has moved towards any sort of precision. Not uncommon to find boiler plants that are 3-4 times the maximum heating load in the winter, or fans running at 100% 24/7 when code only requires half of that.
Costs just get passed on to tenants so there was never much motivation to do better, the only reason building owners are moving now is because of government regulation and incentive programs.
I used to work in HVAC. I remember we had a small cold room that was struggling to maintain temperature, as in, design was supposed to be 0°F but it couldn’t get below 36°F. There was a large hole in the box that was undoubtedly the cause of the problem, so I asked the installer how they accounted for that. “Oh, I doubled the infiltration value.” When I tried calculating the actual losses it was way, way higher than the infiltration value. Like, the room needed someting like 3-4 times its total refrigeration capacity to reach target with a giant fucking hole in the box.
No idea who thought putting a giant hole in the box was a good idea.
“Sealed” is also a vague suggestion with HVAC. Every ducting join, every piece of equipment, all of it leaks. I shudder to think how much heating/cooling is wasted that way.
I work in building science. It’s obscene how little actual design and quality control goes into residential homes.
The typical design is just one step above being illegal, and people are often scared off of doing anything more than that by the threat of increased cost. However, they don’t realize that they pay for it either way; either on their mortgage, or on utilities. Only one of those you can actually own in the end.
So how does a homeowner fix it? The duct work is already in, so is it just about choosing more wisely when replacing the furnace/ac/heat pump?
It starts early in the design process. But at that stage, it would be best to pause installation, have a mechanical engineer do the mechanical design (including equipment selection) based on an energy model and install the recommended equipment.
I loved that Technology Connections video.
Technology connections did a video on this, it’s actually insane how much wastage there is
Talking about energy wastage, next time you’re walking around commercial buildings, pay attention to how many lights are on during the middle of the day.
Drove by a closed car lot the other day. The place has been abandoned for months. Weeds growing up everywhere. The entire lot is fenced off getting ready for demolition.
The only building on the lot is small and completely surrounded by glass walls, so you can see right through it. The red neon around the outside of the building is still on 24 hours.condo had a fire and later I could see lights on every evening. I called it in but nothing happened. Seemed dangerous to me that power was not shutdown from going to it.
Ugh. Yup.
I learned that after buying my house. My furnace is 3x what my house needs and is expected to be an expensive repair someday.
DARN THOSE EVIL REGULATIONS!
Ironically in this case doing the job properly reduces costs significantly.
Everything in the chain from the outlets, ductwork, damper, valves, condensers, pipes, tray, fans, component ratings & switchboards can be reduced to a reasonable size.
Which then has peripheral benefits like reduced transport costs, crane lifts, space in service zones between floors/risers, materials & running costs of the completed buildingthey’re filthy communists i tell ya
The quality of education at college and university is in free fall.
Most of hacking is done by mass effort with maybe a couple percent of people that aren’t doing basic things to protect themselves being affected. That couple of percent is enough to keep the hackers flush. (So please, follow basic cybersecurity steps, people.)
The plain truth of the matter, though, is that if a hacker or group of hackers is targeting someone individually for reasons, that person is in real trouble.
This has been a PSA for everyone chasing fame and clout.
I miss the days of Anonymous (there was a sub group of the actual hackers whose name I can’t recall and a bunch of wannabes I guess providing them a crowd to lose themselves in) doing justice hacks. Not that they were always on the right side of things, but now everything is state actors trying to bring us all closer to Armageddon.
Alt2600?
Tips for being secure online:
- Use your browser’s password manager to generate random passwords.
- In the rare case you need to manually enter your password into a site or app be very suspicious and very careful.
- Never give personal information to someone who calls or emails you. If necessary look up the contact info of who called you yourself and call them back before divulging and details. Keep in mind that Caller ID and the From address of emails can be faked.
- Update software regularly. Security problems are regularly fixed.
That’s really all you need. You don’t even need 2FA, it is nice extra security but if you use random passwords and don’t enter your passwords into phishing sites it is largely unnecessary.
Im not so sure about your number 1. Fine if otherwise they won’t use one but personally I use bitwarden online for unimportant ones and a local keypass for important ones.
The reason I say browser password manager is two main reasons:
- It is absolutely critical that it checks the domain to prevent phishing.
- People already have a browser and are often logged into some sort of sync. It is a small step to use it.
So yes, if you want to use a different password manager go right ahead, as long as it checks the domain before filling the password.
What do you mean a password manager that checks the domain? Isn’t the auto fill based on the domain? I can’t imagine how a password manager could fill a password without checking the domain, it wouldn’t know which password to fill after all. Do any actually exist?
There are some password managers where you need to either manually look up passwords and copy+paste or autotype them or select the correct password from a dropdown. Some of these will come with an optional browser extension which mitigates this but some don’t really tract domain metadata in a concrete way to do this linking.
Some examples would be Pass which doesn’t have any standard metadata for domain/URL info (although some informal schemes are used by various tools including browser-integration extensions) and KeePass which has the metadata but doesn’t come with a browser extension by default.
I see, so you mean manually getting the password out of the manager instead of domain based autofill.
I was a bit confused on this to. Are their ones that constantly spam all your passwords at every opportunity???
Most problems are being solved by turning it off and on again.
The navy manual for troubleshooting equipment in the field includes “lift 3-6 inches and drop”
Percussive maintenance can help sometimes. It’s not a permanent fix but you can’t always do the right fix in the middle of the ocean. Things it can help with: dislodging debris in mechanical components, reseating electrical connections that are corroding, and making yourself feel better.
To be fair, you may not always want a permanent fix for everything. Mostly because the most permanent solution will always be a temporary one. :v
High velocity decommissioning also satisfies that last item.
Well it didn’t work, my grampa is still sleeping, i’ll try the unplug for several minutes trick, I’ll let you know
Try a force restart…or there is always the possibility that he is stuck in a boot loop
What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.
. . .
Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.
(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)
Dude, I just had my mechanic call and tell me my car was out of oil. I’ve never felt so dumb and ashamed.
And if that doesn’t work unplug it for a while and plug it back in.
I have anxiety and depression. Gonna give your idea a try.
A good chunk of my work is scheduled turning off and on again in the right order so things don’t break
This is a funny joke and all but it’s so far from actually true.
Source: 27 years working in I.T.
These aren’t secrets, but may not be well known (unless you watch LPL):
Sentry Safes aren’t safes, they are fire boxes with a fancy lock.
High security locks are not high security because of the lock design, but because the keys are very difficult to have duplicated.
No one (except maybe intelligence agencies) breaks in to a house by picking a lock, especially in the US. Windows, weak door frames, and, in a pinch, making a hole in the wall are all faster ways of getting in.
Car keys are so expensive because many manufacturers charge a subscription or per-use fee to access and program the keys to the ignition. These costs are passed on to consumers
No one is picking your locks just to move things around or steal small, insignificant items. You are either suffering from a mental disorder or a trusted member of the household is gaslighting you (it’s not gaslighting though,
you’reyour grasp of reality is slipping. Don’t call me for a pick proof lock, just get help please)Some manufacturers (you know, in China) will put any sticker you want on the products they produce, including UL and ANSI stickers. Before buying a product that is supposedly fire-rated, such as a fire safe, check the UL website to verify the item is actually listed with them.
“Grade 1” door hardware sold in stores like Lowe’s or Home Depot is, at best, Grade 2, and is likely Grade 3 (residential grade). These grades are really just about how durable the product is over time, and how much abuse they will endure by the public.
And just a little practical advice. Find a qualified, honest locksmith before you need one. We’re like plumbers. If you wait until you have an emergency to find one, the quality will be questionable. There are a lot of scammers out there. If you don’t have a resource for locksmiths beyond Google, look on the ALOA website for members in your area. The good ones will know who the other good ones are, and won’t be shy about sharing that info if they are unavailable or too far away
A lot of the “generic” or “store brand” packaged foods are literally the same exact product as the name brands, only in different boxes/bags
