Don’t cost-optimize people’s homes. Just don’t.

The amount of times I’ve gone to a maintenance job with a description “people are cold”, only to see a plaque on the wall stating that this building has been optimized by Company X is actually infuriating.

And the worst thing is that they inject their proprietary, remote control system on top of the original automation. This means that I can’t change anything without literally reprogramming the entire site.

So I’m standing there, trying to figure out how to tell an 80yo lady “you’re cold because the building managers want to save some money” without going on an anti-capitalist rant. This has had a success rate of around 30%.

I do ameuter music production, one hill I will die on is there is no right way to mix a track of music it is entirely subjective and mixing a track of music is way more creative of a practice then some faceious salesman make it out online

Ebikes are motorbikes, not bycicles.

Not saying they aren’t fun or useful at times, but they shouldn’t be treated as a bicycles.

I don’t care if the motor engages using a button, twist grip, your feet or twitching your nose, it is a motor and exceeds your natural body power.

give me a job or im dead how about that hill

Modern PLCs are indistinguishable from IPCs with an RTOS and there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to use a proper language for them - with a stdlib and external library support. But manufacturers defined the term and have the industry hostage so you have to buy semi functional libraries and can’t use git, unit testing or other automation.

Do not power law fit your process data for predictive models. No. Stop. Put the keyboard down. Your model will almost certainly fail to extrapolate beyond the training range. Instead, think for at least two seconds about the chemistry and the process, maybe review your kinetics textbook, and only then may you fit to a physics-based model for which you will determine proper statistical significance. Poor fit? Too bad, revise your assumptions or reconsider whether your “data” are really just noise.

Always run qNMR with an internal standard if you are using it to determine purity. And, as a corollary, do not ignore unidentified peaks. Yes, even if it “has always been that way”.

DOE models almost certainly tell you less than you think they do, especially when cross-terms are involved, or when the effects are categorical, or when running a fractional factorial design…

Maybe not technical, but teaching is weird.

If people aren’t having fun/engaged they’re not learning much. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. It’s so frustrating to come across someone who writes the standards you’re supposed to follow and they are the most boring and fake teacher you’ve experienced.

There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.

Transparency + blur + drop shadow is peak UI design and should remain so for the foreseeable future. It provides depth, which adds visual context. Elements onscreen should not appear flat; our human predator brains are hardwired and physiologically evolved to parse depth information.

A plain text physical password notebook is actually more secure than most people think. It’s also boomer-compatible. My folks understand that things like their social security cards need to be kept secure and out of public view. The same can be applied to a physical password notebook. I also think a notebook can be superior to the other ways of generating and storing passwords, at least in some cases.

1. use the same password for everything: obviously insecure.
2. Use complex unique passwords for everything: You’ll never remember them. If complex passwords are imposed as a technical control, even worse if you have to change them often, you’ll just end up with passwords on post-its.
3. use a password manager: You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If the manager gets breached there goes everything.

Dynamic typing sucks.

Type corrosion is fine, structural typing is fine, but the compiler should be able to tell if types are compatible at compile time.

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’re using modern fabrication techniques, a couple 10uf mlcc capacitors in small packages are just as good as traditional decade capacitors (10uf,1uf,0.1uf) for decoupling in pretty much every situation, and you need to worry about less varieties on your bill of materials

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.