• 12 Posts
  • 211 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • All I can say is that in my professional career where I have to write technical reports and summarize technical information I would never represent it that way, and I would be concerned if a colleague, customer, or supplier did it even if they were communicating it to a non technical audience. I would also call out my employer or management if they ever tried to change the representation of the data to something like this.

    That could say more about me than anything else, but that’s where I am at.


  • But centigrade isn’t a measure of absolute units and is disingenuous. Using your argument it requires the consumer/reader to make a number of inferences or assumptions which isn’t a good method of communication in general. It is perfectly valid to say that the cooler took CPU temperatures from 70°C to 35°C.

    Why not just say that. It’s an impressive stat!

    Scales exist for a reason. Cutting 70°C in half is by definition -101.5°C. But let’s assumed somehow everyone is on the same page and that anything below 0°C should just be ignored in this specific scenario and not any other (confusing right?), saying the temperature was cut in half is still confusing! Half from where? Did it go from 20°C to 10°C? From 80°C to 40°C? It just doesn’t mean anything and as said before I would argue just stating the numbers is more impressive and informative.


  • Are we talking about me specifically or people in general? I’ll assume general as I was just relaying a personal anecdote to show that my point/thesis wasn’t just a hypothetical as I do know how to get around it in my specific case.

    In the general context, that’s not a great solution for most people as it is beyond their skill or time set. For the most disadvantaged people just having the ability to have a phone at all and a place to reliably charge it is an issue. There is also the issue is practicality. When I take public transit where I live, the app pulls up a QR code on my phone they gets scanned. I’m not even sure I could fit my laptop screen into the space to scan the QR code if I was emulating Android.

    So I guess my thesis here is that systems should be made more accessible and inclusive rather than requiring those in the minority to either have to put more effort in using a workaround to reach functional parity or end up left out all together.


  • There is one very important aspect that shouldn’t be ignored about the fact at the end. Although it may be technically correct, it is almost certainly not geographically correct. If filling those homes requires a mass movement of people requiring even something as little a a couple of hour drive, is it really relevant?

    Don’t get me wrong, I hate corporate ownership of residential property, and I also think empty homes, especially if it’s a second, third, fourth, etc., should result in some kind of tax penalty. I don’t think using easily discounted facts is ultimately in our best interest when pushing for change to address these issues.


  • Unfortunately yes, and I would go even a step further and say a smart phone is a basic necessity. More and more companies and even government services are operating on the assumption that everyone has a smart phone. I have encountered various services where if a person didn’t have a smart phone they literally can’t use it. I even have personal experience with it.

    My landlord uses a company for payments that can only be interacted with via an app on a smart phone. There is no web portal option. There is no option to mail a check. There is no option to setup a direct bank transfer. I was essentially strong armed into it since the place itself was (and still is) better than almost anything else I saw and is a reasonable price.



  • I’m not convinced the employers know that. At least not the ones that ultimately control hiring. Granted, I’m not CS, I’m in the Mechanical Engineering world and it seems like a similar issue has existed (for possibly different reasons) for the last decade or so. That goes double for the skilled trades that our work heavily relies on. Companies don’t want to spend the time and money developing new talent, they just want to find already developed talent.

    They may throw some money and lip service at some school or community programs, but they don’t really take on the responsibility of insuring a sustainable ecosystem of people in the industry. Like a lot of issues it’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I’m not sure how it is in other parts of the world, butat least in the US, with some rare exceptions, I don’t see people and companies changing from being selfish to trying to maximize the benefit for all without changes in policy, and the likelihood of that is well…



  • Doing work, solving problems, and failing is often the best way for people to learn. I will damn near get fired before I let management schlep menial busy work onto an intern or tell them look but don’t touch. If an intern has to do some kind of mind numbing repetitive task, it won’t be anything that I myself haven’t already had to an equal amount of or at least will be doing side by side with them. As you said, they are there to learn, not fill a hole management was too cheap or lazy to do. .

    It is probably worth while to note that in my industry interns are generally paid pretty well. My internship back in the day paid about double what my job in IT paid when I took it.












  • That doesn’t mean they will ever meet though… 😅

    Not the OP, but I seem to share at least some form of his experience and I actually think this “song” does a really good job of summarizing how I feel about it.

    https://youtu.be/o9kbcGfX35M

    I am as sure there is someone out there for me as I am of anything else I have a high degree of confidence in. On the matter of whether we will ever meet or not though, that I can’t say. Maybe the world is too large and time is too great. In the grand scheme of things we will find out soon enough.