Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
the hill i am willing to die on is: FUCK AI. I’ll be dead before I let it write a single line of code.
There are a load of things in IT where using a processor is the wrong choice, and using an FPGA instead would have made a lot of problems a non-issue.
If you don’t understand that development, security, and operations are all one job you will constantly make crap and probably point at some other team to make excuses about it, but it will be actually be your fault.
Programs have to run. They have to be able to change to meet needs. Implementing working security measures is one of those needs.
The amount of times I’ve had to slap devs hands that wanted to just disable security or remind security that just shutting it down is denial of service is crazy. If it can’t deploy or is constantly down or uses stupid amount of resources it’s also worthless no matter what it looked like for split second you ran on on the dev machine.
The next patch isn’t going to fucking fix it if no one that writes patches knows about the damn issue. Work arounds are hidden technical debt and you have to assume that they will fucking break on some update later. If you are not updating because it breaks your unreported workarounds you will get ignored by the devs at some point, and they are right in doing so.
If you depend on something communicate with the team that works on it. We can send a fucking petabyte of info around the world and to the moon and back before some people write a fucking Ticket, email, or even a IM. Look dumb and asking the stupid question rather than being an actual idiot and leaving something broken for the next decade. We’re all dumb, it’s why we built computers, get over it and just talk to people. If you really struggle with, don’t just communicate, try to over communicate, say an obvious thing now and again just to keep the dialogue open and test that you really on the same page.
That’s my rant/hill borne from ulcers supporting crappy IT orgs and having to overcome my own shortcomings to actually say something in channels where things can actually change and not just griping in private about it.
Okay, I’m pretty late to the party, but here we go. My field is illustration and art, and especially color theory is something that a lot too often is teached plainly wrong. I think it was in the 1950s when Johannes Itten introduced his book on colortheory. In this book, he states that there are three “Grundfarben” (base colors) that will mix into every color. He explained this model with a color ring that you will still find almost anywhere. This model and the fact that there are three Grundfarben is wrong.
There are different angles from where you can approach color mixing in art, and it always depends on what you want to do. When we speak about colors, we actually mean the experience that we humans have, when light rays fall into our eyes. So, it’s actually a perceptual phenomenon, which means it is actually something that has small statistical differences from individual to individual. For example, a greenish blue might be a little bit more green for one person or a little more blue for the other.
Every color, however, has its opposite color. Everybody can test this. Look into a red (not too bright) light for some time and then onto a white wall. The color you will see is the opposite. They will cancel each other out and become white / neutral.
Ittens colormodel, however, is not based in perception. In this model yellow is opposed to violet, which might mix to a neutral color with pigments but not with lightrays. But even that doesn’t work a lot of times. I mean, even his book is printed in six colors, even though his three basecolors are supposedly enough to print every color…
In history lot of colormodels have been less correct course. What is so infuriating is that in Ittens case, he just plainly ignored the correct colortheory that already existed (by Albert Henry Munsell) and created his own with whatever rules that he believes are correct.
Even today, this model and rules are teached at art schools and you can see his color circle plastered all over the internet.
Tldr: Johannes Ittens colormodel is wrong, even though it’s almost everywhere.
(Added tldr)
Fun fact:
OKLab which was created recently by Björn Ottosson as a hobby project, is a pretty accurate perceptual colorspace. It is open Source and has been adapted by Photoshop for Black and White conversion.
I kinda hope painting apps will also impliment it as a standard model for colopickers.
Professionally: Waterfall release cycle kills innovation, and whoever advocates it should be fired on the spot. MVP releases and small, incremental changes and improvements are the way to go.
Personally: Don’t use CSS if tables do what you need. Don’t use Javascript for static Web pages. Don’t overcomplicate things when building Web sites.
Don’t use CSS if tables do what you need.
As a web dev, please don’t. Use a table if you have data that should be (re)presented. Don’t use tables for layout. Please use semantic HTML elements, for the love of accessibility.
Weird i haven’t seen this one yet: the cloud is just someone else’s computers.
Hardly a hot take really…
OP didn’t really ask for a hot take…
I fucking hate AI in HR/hiring. I try so hard not to spread my personal data to LLMs/AI ghuls and the moment I apply for a job I need to survive I have to accept that the HR department’s AI sorting hat now knows a shit ton about me. I just hope these are closed systems. if anyone from a HR department knows more, please let me know
Hardly a hot take really…
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I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else’s life and shit your own values all over them.
I don’t drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.
My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.
The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.
Disabled people are so often treated like children and it just sucks.
Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others (“I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows”), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there’s gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes “seriously affecting others”, and there’s going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you’re not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.
However.
I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it’s reasonable for those other people to say “I am willing to buy you food, but I don’t want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision.” That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn’t.
I think that there’s a qualitative difference between saying “I don’t want to pay to buy someone else alcohol” and “I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they’ve bought themselves.”
I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn’t be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.
It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.
If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say “I’m fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don’t want to pay for alcohol”? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.
If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.
I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.
How are you distinguishing:
- it’s ok to treat all men as criminals who may attack women and women as victims who may be attacked so we need to keep them from fraternizing
From
- it’s not ok to try to reduce their self-destructive behaviors that are keeping them from being able to support themselves
Patient autonomy!
People are idiots and it’s the designers’ duty to remove opportunities for an idiot to hurt themselves up and just short of impacting function.
Cleaning, organizing, and documentation are high priorities.
Every job I’ve worked at has had mountains of “The last guy didn’t…” that you walk into and it’s always a huge pain in the ass. They didn’t throw out useless things, they didn’t bother consolidating storage rooms, and they never wrote down any of their processes, procedures, or rationals. I’ve spent many hours at each job just detangling messes because the other person was to busy or thought it unimportant and didn’t bother to spend the time.
Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.
Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.
In many jobs, someone with the power to fire you makes the priorities, allocates your time and does not think long-term.
I’m so hot for you right now.
Starting a new job soon, and I’m paying for some holes in documentation as I prep my offboarding documentation for my current team. Definitely making it a priority to do better going forward! Being lazy in the moment is nice but the “stitch in time” adage is definitely true
Don’t fucking paste content from a word doc into your IDE. Some people I work with think it’s a time saver.
Do it via an actual text editor like Notepad++ to clear out all the bullshit.
I think you can do ctrl shift v in some programs to strip down to text only
Technisation and standardisation are good for the EMS sector.
The whole “it was better when we could do what we want and back then we had only real calls with sicker people and everything was good” is fucking aweful and hurting the profession.
Look, you fucking volunteer dick, I know you do this for 10 years longer than me (and I do it for 25 now),but unlike you I did it full-time and probably had more shifte in one year than you had in your life. Now my back is fucked because back then there was no “electrohydraulic stretcher”, no stair chair, the ventilator was twice as heavy (and could basically nothing), the defibrillator weighted so much we often had to switch carrying it after two floors up.
And we had just as many shit calls,but got actually attacked worse because the shit 2kg radios were shit and had next to zero coverage indoors, and so had cellphones which led to you being unable to even call for backup.
And of course we had longer shifts,needed to work more hours and the whole job market was even more fucked.
“But we didn’t need this and that,we looked at the patient”. Yeah,go fuck yourself. MUCH more people died or took damage from that. So many things were not seen. And it was all accepted as “yeah, that’s how life is”.
So fuck everyone in this field and their nostalgia.
In the medical system here, there is a trend toward imaging and other tests but no actual examination of the patient.
I have a friend whose injury didn’t look too bad on MRI. But a lesser scan (CT?) they don’t value as much showed the actual problem and confirmed the complaint. Our greater trust for the new hotness, and discounting tools we needed to use before the new exam tools even when the patient begs, is not a perfect solution.
It seems we could be doing both and getting a better understanding.
I totally agree with everything you say about the heavy tools and bad radios - family was in rural EMS, and the bodily wear and tear seems to be prevalent among all the old peers.
Not everything needs to be deployed to a cluster of georedundant K8s nodes, not everything needs to be a container, Docker is not always necessary. Just run the damn binary. Just build a .deb package.
(Disclaimer: yes, all those things can have merit and reasons. Doesn’t mean you have to shove them into everything.)
But then how will I ship my machine seeing as it works for me?
Damn, I haven’t thought of that! Looks like I have to use a subdirectory of your Homedir from now on.
Just symlink my home folder to your PC and we are good to go.
I see you are well-versed in the ways of Citrix.
Genius!
Not strictly technical, although organizational science might be seen as a technical field on it’s own.
Regularly rotating people between teams is desirable.
Many companies just assign you in a team and that’s where you’re stuck forever unti you quit. In slightly better places they will try to find a “perfect match” for you.
What I’m saying is that moving people around is even better:
You spread institutional knowledge around.
You keep everyone engaged. Typically on a new job you learn for the first few months, then you have a peak of productivity when you have all the new ideas. After some 2 years you either reach a plateau or complacency.It’s even better for software, since now everyone regularly needs to learn a new code base. It’s a huge incentive to make code better quality and more maintainable
I’m in health sciences and I wish we would do more education days/conferences. I’m a med lab tech and I feel like no one knows what the lab actually does, they just send samples off and the magic lab gremlins Divine these numbers/results. I feel the same way when another discipline discusses what they do, its always interesting!
I’ll allow it, institutional knowledge while sounding good does cause business continuity problems.
Workplace safety is quickly turning from a factual and risk-based field into a vibes-based field, and that’s a bad thing for 95% of real-world risks.
To elaborate a bit: the current trend in safety is “Safety Culture”, meaning “Getting Betty to tell Alex that they should actually wear that helmet and not just carry it around”. And at that level, that’s a great thing. On-the-ground compliance is one of the hardest things to actually implement.
But that training is taking the place of actual, risk-based training. It’s all well and good that you feel comfortable talking about safety, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re not actually making things more safe. This is also a form of training that’s completely useless at any level above the worksite. You can’t make management-level choices based on feeling comfortable, you need to actually know some stuff.
I’ve run into numerous issues where people feel safe when they’re not, and feel at risk when they’re safe. Safety Culture is absolutely important, and feeling safe to talk about your problems is a good thing. But that should come AFTER being actually able to spot problems.
I’m always in favour of actually testing safety stuff.
Does that fall arrest line actually work? Go walk over to that way until you can’t.
Can this harness hold you without cutting circulation off to your legs? Go sit in it for an hour and see.The mining industry emphasizes safely culture, just like what you said, and a lot of it is focused on wearing PPE.
There are still too many preventable deaths and accidents.
I think safety is talked about and vibe-based to please investors.
