𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Then the first part is interpreted (in the US, anyway) as a middle name, not as part of the last name. I did run into a recently married woman who did that: dropped her middle name, moved her last to the middle, and used her spouse’s last name.

More commonly, places that don’t take hyphens tend to just run the two names together: Axel-Smith becomes AxelSmith.

Programmers can be really dumb.

There are a frightening number of systems that don’t allow “-”, which isn’t even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, “I paid for money for my name; I’m not letting it go.” (Note: I wasn’t pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It’s not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.

I’m hoping that, in our hubris, we’ll re-create the environment that allows dinosaurs to rise again.

Sure, I could do that, but not everyone can. But you still have the problem that many of these devices don’t function well unless they can phone home; they don’t very firmware upgrades, and they expect to be controlled by a bespoke app. If you filter out all the devices that are HA compatible without running through an external service, you shear the product choices in half.

This is good information. I had a complete failure with flashing Tasmota once, and bricked a $100 device.

I like the project, though. My biggest complaint is that - at least for what I was trying to flash, the Linux support was iffy. I was trying to flash something for HA, and the instructions assumed I had access to the computer running HA (which is a headless device in a closet in the basement - entirely unpractical for doing fiddly pinning while trying to flash) or using a web browser with webUSB - which Firefox on Linux doesn’t. So eventually I found a completely unrelated set of instructions I could run from the CLI from my desktop over a cable connected to said desktop, and while it appeared successful, the device is bricked. I can’t even get it into flash mode anymore.

I don’t think any of this has to do with Tasmota, except that the Linux tooling seems either weak, or make assumes people are running Chrome; and if you’re security conscious enough to be flashing a device to run Tasmota, you’re not running Chrome.

So I’m not doing that again. It’s a hundred bucks and two days of digging around for tooling and instructions I’d like back.

Again, not Tasmota’s fault, but it’s not super accessible.

I once owned a bunch of WiFi connected devices. One day I inspected my router logs and found out that they were all making calls to a bunch of services that weren’t the vendor - things like Google, and Facebook.

WiFi connected devices require connecting to a router; in most homes, this is going to be one that’s also connected to the internet - most people aren’t going to buy a second router just for their smart home, or set up a disconnected second LAN on their one router. And nearly all of these devices come with an app, which talks to the device through an external service (I’m looking at you, Honeywell, and you, Rainbird). This is a privacy shit-show. WiFi is a terrible option for smart home devices.

ZigBee, well, I haven’t had any luck with it - pairing problems which are certainly just a learning curve in my part and not an issue with the protocol. I chose ZWave myself because I read about the size and range limitations of ZigBee technology, versus ZWave, but honestly I could have gone either way. Back then, there was no appreciable price difference in devices. Most hubs support both, though, and I can’t see why I wouldn’t mix them (other than I need to figure out how to get ZigBee to work).

In any case, low-power BT, ZigBee, or Zwave are all options, whereas I will not allow more WiFi smart devices in my house. I’m stuck with Honeywell and Rainbird, for… reasons… but that’s it. I don’t need to be poking more holes in my LAN security.

Go ahead… you can whisper it to me

I contest the original premise. When I was traveling a lot for work, I spent a lot of time packing to ensure that I had enough combinations of shirts, ties, belts, and shoes such that I never wore the same outfit twice. Yes, I did economize on suits, and tended to bring only one; that’s because men don’t have the female privilege of having such a vast variety of acceptable business-wear. Being able to dress in outfits for work that don’t take up nearly an entire carry-on by themselves is a luxury men don’t have. Shit, I wish I could wear skirts; they take up less packing space.

On the other hand, the shoe situation for women sucks. A man can get away with one pair of shoes for a week; it’s a lot harder for women to match a week’s worth of business clothes to a single pair of shoes… and in a pinch, a man can wear those shoes anywhere, whereas a woman doesn’t want to be in the same heels all day, every day. That’s an advantage men have.

Women can mix and match outfits just as well as men do; they can get away with two different shirts and two different pants and make it last 4 days without comment, same as a man can. And a guy that wears the same suit, shirt, and tie 4 days in a row will definitely get noticed, and not in a positive way.

Opening an office is a completely different thing; there is an enormous difference between offshore contractors and offshore employees. That much, I’ll agree with.

In the US, though, it’s usually cost-driven. When offshore mandates come down, it’s always in terms of getting more people for less cost. However, in most cases, you don’t get more quality code faster by throwing more people at it. It’s very much a case of “9 women making a baby in one month.” Rarely are software problems solved with larger teams; usually, a single, highly skilled programmer will do more for a software project than 5 junior developers.

Not an projects are the same. Sometimes what you do need is a bunch of people. But it’s by far more the exception than the rule, and yet Management (especially in companies where software isn’t the core competency) almost always assumes the opposite.

If you performed a survey in the US, I would bet good money that in the majority of cases the decision to offshore was not made by line managers, but by someone higher in the chain who did not have a software engineering degree.

Very close, but you should somehow represent the fact that the entire area around the close button - anything that isn’t a black pixel - is a big “open a pop-up window to the advertiser’s site” button.

Thing is, outsourcing never stopped. It’s still going strong, sending jobs to whichever country is cheapest.

India is losing out to Indonesia, to Mexico, and to S American countries.

It’s a really stupid drive to the bottom, and you always get what you pay for. Want a good development team in Bengaluru? It might be cheaper than in the US, but not that much cheaper. Want good developers in Mexico? You can get them, but they’re not the cheapest. And when a company outsources like this, they’ve already admitted they’re willing to sacrifice quality for cost savings, and you - as a manager - won’t be getting those good, more expensive developers. You’ll be getting whoever is cheapest.

It is among the most stupid business practices I’ve had to fight with in my long career, and one of the things I hate the most.

Developers are not cogs. You can’t swap them out like such, and any executive who thinks you can is a fool and an incompetent idiot.

Hey! I have a bowl of hard candy on my coffee table! What, you don’t like hard candy‽

If it was good enough for grandma, it’s good enough for me. 😤

having a crew full of resentful balls of anxiety is not worth it to them.

I completely believe you. Still, at the time I was making the choice, I didn’t know this; I knew for sure that while I was in, my self-determination would be strictly limited, but I didn’t know details, and there was no. fucking. way. that I was going to risk being stationed on a sub.

a vague sense of exclusivity

I have a recollection about this being a thing: that there’s a certain caché among Navy folks about being sub crew. I once knew a retired nuclear sub captain, and while he was a day drinker, he was pretty proud of his service. He also fell asleep in meetings, but I guess he did his job well enough for this all to be overlooked. I visited his office once (in our office in another city), and one of his bottom desk drawers was full of just bottles of whiskey. I’ve never encountered anything like that, before or since. But I digress.

More proof. It’s called the “Bullring”, but i always thought it looked like a sperm whale.

This is exactly Why I’m conflicted about doxxing.

Social pressure picks up where the legal system stops; it’s the thing that encourages good manners and politeness, because those can’t (and shouldn’t be) be regulated. Shaming is a powerful force, and can be a force for good.

Shaming can also be a force for ill, and the downsides of doxxing probably outweigh the upsides. But still… I think we’re missing a mechanism that would normally moderate bad social and ethical behaviors like this.

I wish, I wish… I wish I was a fish.

I wish there was an instrument other than the stock market whereby private individuals could combine their funds to perform hostile take-overs, and then manage them by pre-agreed conditions.

Like: we’re going to buy Twitter, build an AP interface on it, federate it, and operate it like a non-profit. We’re going to have a set of these S core values, with yearly votes on changes proportional to investment. No single investor can own more than T percent of shares Investors can sell their shares, or buy shares. Stock will never spilt. Management salaries, combined, can never exceed more than M% of non-management combined salaries, and run it as a Holocracy. Or, maybe, shares can only be sold to employees, who have to sell to other employees when they leave.

You know; try to design a good operating model that avoids the pitfalls of other companies, and can adapt when the model demonstrates perverse incentives. Put more thought into it than my ramblings above.

But ten billion dollars is a lot of money to put together, and the rules I’d like to see necessarily exclude the sort of profit-only driven capitalists who’d be able to contribute heavy loads, and would limit the amount that could contribute.

I may as well wish I were a fish.

It has worth. It doesn’t have value.

Unfortunate outcome, sad cause. Sounds like he cared enough for the animal to put some effort into a noble funeral, but just fucked it up. Other people have caused conflagrations for worse reasons: intentional, carelessness, whatever.

Of all the people causing a fire like this, I have the most sympathy for this guy.

Related: a comedian once had a schtick about California road signs about it being illegal to throw burning objects out of your car; he joked that it was stupid, because what, was he driving down there road witha charcoal briquets in the passenger seat, just tossing coals out the window? While it was funny, I always thought, “Yeah. That’s almost exactly what it is.” Fucking idiots used to toss their cigarette butts out the window all the time.

I’m saying that I’m claustrophobic, and being in a submarine is a nightmare scenario, regardless of how safe it is.

Also: while I don’t know the selection process for US Navy submarines, my experience with the military is that you can have an opinion about how you want to be posted, but no actual decision-making ability. So I may hope to fly Navy jets, but the Navy can simply say: “fuck you, you’re going to be stationed on a submarine,” and there’s little I could do about it.

Also: accidents happen, subs sink, regardless of the country. It’s pretty high on my list of ways not to die, just below Nutty Putty cave and getting sucked into Bolton Strid.

Also: submarines are weapons of war, so there’s a non-zero chance someone, at some point, will be trying to make you sink.

Also: I was saying that were I a Chinese submarine crew, an incident like this would not fill me with confidence about my posting.

Absolutely. I mean, people drown in shallow water all the time; if it flooded, it wouldn’t matter if it were 20m or 200m; you’d still be dead.

But it was a best case for China, since recovery was about as easy as it could possibly be.

Also, in dock, there’s a better chance that it wasn’t fully manned, or that it didn’t flood and they could get folks out. I’m no submarineologist, but it’s difficult to imagine a case where a submarine sank at dock without flooding, though, so my guess is some people died.