I spent the first half of my life in Alberta; had never seen a rat nor a cockroach. I moved further east in the country, cockroaches in my first apartment the first week there... and then discovered rats near the waterfront within the month.
My dad and uncles lived near the southern border as kids, would hunt rats by the train station/grain elevator with a .22 back in the 50's & 60's.
As a public service employee within the GOC, I feel the pain expressed by the author. I sat through a meeting today where somebody with no domain knowledge puffed up their chest to show off their gpt created master lesson plan for a four year long internal training plan that is being re-worked.
I could feel the heads of those around the table that had been teaching this material for a decade starting to explode as this was exactly what others in the thread have described: it looked good until vetted by experts, then it was easy to poke holes as it was just not right
The problem in the public service is that the experts who can review the output are leaving or being nudged out.
Although it has been a couple decades since I've worked on construction sites, the underlying factor is that of the culture - this was northern Alberta - you had to be 'tough' and that meant eating steak, drinking hard and ignoring basic safety protocols like dust protection masks, eye guards, etc.
I was in my early 20's and worked with guys only a few years older than me that were already bordering on obese. The physical nature was typically repetitive and while sometimes requiring raw strength, had very little cardio/endurance aspects.
Of course there were exceptions, like the wiry 'old guy' who could take two bundles of shingles up a ladder over his shoulder and slam three beers for lunch.
They were being paid crazy amounts (for their age and the rest of their peers) and it was spent on rye and weed.
That exporting an svg from Illustrator and dropping into Fusion as a sketch is not a very wise approach - the scale is completely off! DXF is the way to go, keep your units in mm across the workflow.
I've not used any CAD tools in a significant way in nearly three decades - all very familiar and yet not at the same time. Form-Z and ArchiCAD were my bread and butter back then, despised AutoCAD but here I am back in the Autodesk realm again with Fusion :-(
Maybe I'm old skool... but for the last 30+ years I've been using a combination of photoshop, illustrator, FCP, after effects (back when it was CoSA...), some audio editing and mixing in quite a bit of code as well. While others on my team specialize in one or two domains, I've managed to keep my skills in many.
Back in the day I was considered a 'MultiMedia' creative. I don't even know what to call myself these days.
I would suggest Loonshots - fascinating dive into both the technology and the conditions that allowed people to really make stuff happen (or not)
https://www.bahcall.com/book/
I live in the Canadian Prairies, run outdoors year round. One thing I've experienced a few times is my contact lenses feeling much more rigid, which I've attributed to them starting to freeze up in extreme situations. Typically near the end of longer, 3+ hour runs where I'd be facing the wind and moving slower. Temps lower than -25 celsius and a 10 km/h wind cools things down fast.
While we're ranting about the 'infotainment' systems on cars, how about the apps? The Kia Connect enrages me every time I have to use it for my wife's car. It makes the in-car system seem snappy and awesome. The fact that they want to start charging for it after the 'trial' period is un-believable.
My nine year old has been using Minecraft education edition, Swift Playgrounds and Lego Boost to figure out programming. In Swift, he figures out structure and concepts, in Boost it is the interactions with the sensors and in Minecraft he puts it all together to make traps, contraptions and just experiment.
Here's my realm: We have a react based "framework" that in the end is zipped up and delivered as a SCORM package to be embedded in a Learning Management System. We use React Router to manage navigation.
After a quick scan of the Next docs, all references to routing seem to tie back to server side which is a non starter, as the SCORM is standalone HTML/CSS/JS/Media - that we happen to embellish at run time with some api calls.
This is a case where the pure SPA with no server side is the only way to go; seems like a real pain to go against the default state of Next. Am I wrong and am just missing something? Again, been occasionally looking at next and the like over the past while, but never had time to really dig into into it.
These guys seem to have a niche: hauling logs off of mountains. Regenerative braking on the way down when heavy; using a Diesel engine as a generator in the truck's engine bay.
https://www.edisonmotors.ca/trucks
First winter with a Kia Soul EV here - and at -20° C this past week, after about 10 minutes with just heated seats/steering wheel on and no fan/forced air heating, it starts fogging up and my feet (even in decent winter boots) start getting chilly.
Turn on the heater and crank the fan, and watch the range drop about 3-5km per increment on the fan dial.
Our other vehicle is an old Jeep Liberty with a V6; gas mileage drops on it as well in winter - combination of some pre-warming and using full time 4WD more. I've always planned for 20-40% less range since I started driving well over 30 years ago, it is just something you do living in a truly cold winter climate.
Or a standard feature if you're living on the Canadian prairies.
In the mid 70's my uncle left Edmonton to do his doctorate in the Bay Area, and had his classmates at Berkeley convinced that his big Dodge Charger was electric because of the block heater cord on the front of it :-)
As I am preparing to update a 10 year old project done in backbone/coffeescript this whole thread hits hard. Likewise a react prototype done in 2018 that is all class based that is going to be next to revive.
Maybe I should just write my own framework... quick, to the name generator sites!
As others have mentioned, the absolute nonsense of needing two or three streaming subscriptions to watch all 82 games of a team's season is infuriating. Particular with the garbage streams on TSN - some games were a full 20% of pixelated smear - on a wired connection getting well over 900 Mb/s, and surprise, never any dropped streams on other services.
The kicker of course, was the influx of gambling ads on TSN this season, thankfully, at least on the NHL app for the other games the ads are replaced by the gentle ice making video :-)
Yes, the VPN will work in some instances, but despite being savvy, my spouse will never fart around with the hoops to get the VPN on the Apple TV which is where most games get streamed.
The whole thing needs to burnt down and re-built with a model that doesn't suck so bad.
All this and more. I'm fortunate enough that while I could afford to hire trades to do all the things I've done in and outside of our house in the last couple years (gutted/rebuilt kitchen & bathrooms, built phase one of a three phase deck/backyard oasis) I have to keep telling my spouse, yes, we could hire someone, but I really LIKE doing this stuff. Like really like.
It's now got to a point that the requests, and "He can build that" comments to friends are not accompanied with the trademark eye roll.
All the points the author hit ring true - planning, design, tool choice, etc have similar parallels to code and systems I work with during the day. But, I can cook meals for my family knowing that I built that space, then sit on the deck watching the wind in the trees knowing how many pieces of pressure treated lumber are holding me up and how it felt putting them all together. I never get that visceral connection using a web app.
My perspective on this is a bit different. I used to be a race director for ultra-marathons. I ended up having a serial cheater show up to a couple of my events, and end up winning.
The biggest scam was that I comped him a free entry for winning to come back, which happened twice. So that means the legit winner lost out on that, a token amount, maybe $150, but it still, 6+ years on, pisses me off that I was duped.
For me it was a huge "Why??" we were a small, regional race, didn't have any status as a qualifier or anything. By all accounts and the subsequent magazine article about the cheater revealed what in hindsight would be some serious mental health issues on his part.
Rapid Viz by Kurt Hanks is a great book. It was a textbook when I was doing industrial design courses a long time ago. I think I have the first edition, but it looks like the third is available on Amazon.
My dad and uncles lived near the southern border as kids, would hunt rats by the train station/grain elevator with a .22 back in the 50's & 60's.