It would be somewhat understandable that Autopilot stops working because Eight Sleep’s backend is down but not being able to even adjust the temperature locally is ridiculous and completely unacceptable for such a high-end (and expensive) product.
A person on X wrote: “Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage. Cmon now.” //
Eight Sleep users will be relieved to hear that the company is working to make their products usable during Internet outages. But many are also questioning why Eight Sleep didn’t implement local control sooner. This isn’t Eight Sleep’s first outage, and users can also experience personal Wi-Fi problems. And there’s an obvious user benefit to being able to control their bed’s elevation and temperature without the Internet or if Eight Sleep ever goes out of business.
For Eight Sleep, though, making flagship features available without its app while still making enough money isn’t easy. Without forcing people to put their Eight Sleep devices online, it would be harder for Eight Sleep to convince people that Autopilot subscriptions should be mandatory. //
mygeek911 Ars Scholae Palatinae
14y
858
Subscriptor++
“AWS ate my sleep” wasn’t on my Bingo card.
The Ferguson system refers to the three-point implement linkage you’ll find on all modern tractors, the brainchild of the Irish engineer Harry Ferguson. The film below the break is a marketing production for American farmers, and it features the Ford-built American version of the tractor known to Brits and Europeans as the Ferguson TE20.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47erWWuarco //
As the four-wheeled machines grew in size and their implements moved beyond the size of their horse-drawn originals, they started to encounter a new set of problems which the film below demonstrates in detail. In short, a plough simply dragged by a tractor exerts a turning force on the machine, giving the front a tendency to lift and the rear a lack of traction. The farmers of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to counter this by loading their tractors with extra weights, at the expense of encumbering them and compromising their usefulness. Ferguson solved this problem by rigidly attaching the plough to the tractor through his three-point linkage while still allowing for flexibility in its height. The film demonstrates this in great detail, showing the hydraulic control and the feedback provided through a valve connected to the centre linkage spring.
GeekyOldFart
Three languages
And I'm not talking about programming languages, where most of us are fluent in half a dozen or so.
1: Regulatorian: This is the language of politicians and lawyers. It sets the mandates on banks, hospitals, schools etc. It contains nuances and terms of art that sometimes make a word mean something totally different to what you would infer if you heard it in general conversation.
2: Beancounterese: Spoken by accountantrs, salesmen and middle manglement. It sounds very similar to regulatorian but is sufficiently different in some of its meanings that it's as big a gulf as between old scots and english.
3: Geekian: The language of hard science, mathematics, real-world realities and the only one to use when specifying what a programmer needs to code. Because they will code what you tell them to, and it will work the way this language describes it.
The same word can mean different things in these three languages.
We have to be fluent in all three to accurately interpret requirements and predict what the emerging software will look like, to take error logs and demonstrate to (sometimes hostile) manglement what corrective action is needed and where it needs to be applied.
Michael H.F. WilkinsonSilver badge
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Re: Three languages
It gets worse, as there are quite a few Geekian dialects. I have learnt to speak a couple over the years, and know the word "morphology" can have radically different meanings, depending on whether you are talking to a medical doctor, an astronomer, or an image processing specialist. Great fun when you are in a project with different geeks each speaking their own dialect.
Shirley Knot
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Re: Three languages
Well said!
When writing specs for dev projects and talking to those speaking Regulatorian or Beancounterese it involves finding out what they actually mean, without saying "What the fuck do you actually mean?!" The skill is in performing iterative attempts without making them blow their stacks! The most frustrated person I had to deal with was a lovely chap that'd been doing his thing for decades, in manufacturing/engineering. He knew exactly what he was doing, but couldn't articulate it - quite understandable, not part of his world. Once he understood that I was just a white collar noob and he was the expert he calmed right down and enjoyed going into as much detail as needed. Explosive decompression averted and job done!
Over the past few days, X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has been the scene of a fairly intense discussion between guys like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others who are in favor of "high skill" immigration in the form of a massive increase in H1B visas that allow the hiring of foreign workers and a large number of devoted Trump fans who see H1B visas as a way corporate America has of replacing American workers with what amounts to chattel labor. //
Regardless of my view on the subject (and I do see H1B visas as a way for businesses to depress wages and create a captive and compliant workforce), I admire Musk's willingness to duke it out with all comers. That is something that would have been impossible with Jack Dorsey's Twitter.
Vivek Ramaswamy, though, [hit] a nerve. He believes that Americans are not culturally adapted to working in the tech field.
Vivek Ramaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy
·
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
...
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
11:02 AM · Dec 26, 2024 //
Rachel Bovard @rachelbovard
·
According to Census Bureau data, the US has more than 2x as many American workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs. And many of the STEM jobs that do exist go to foreigners, because our immigration system allows them to legally be paid less.
But sure, it’s the tv shows.
Vivek Ramaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
1:40 PM · Dec 26, 2024
Rep. Mike Collins @RepMikeCollins
·
The United States graduates over half a million STEM students per year. If there is an issue in the tech workforce, then we need to address it at the educational level, not import a problem away.
4:04 PM · Dec 26, 2024. //
On the one hand, Musk and Ramaswamy are right. The US must make it easier for top-shelf talent to come to America. That isn't a problem for major tech players like Google, Meta, etc., because their brand draws the best, and the work environment doesn't tolerate mediocrity. On the other hand, there is no doubt that run-of-the-mill H1Bs are not superior to American workers. Their competitive advantage is that they are cheap and don't cause labor problems.
As much as we don't like to hear it, Ramaswamy has a point about the culture we're developing. One of the responses to his critique was this. //
TheLastRefuge @TheLastRefuge2
·
Dear, @VivekGRamaswamy, my counter take..... 😇
Several years ago, Florida Power and Light won the prestigious international Edward Demming Award for excellence in multi-platform engineering, efficiency superiority and total quality in the process of energy management.
You see, the reviewers couldn’t actually quantify the reason why the Florida-based energy company was so successful. In response the FPL field leadership laughed, took out magic markers and wrote on the back of their hard hats: “WE’RE NOT GOOD, WE’RE RUCKY.”
A few years later, every single Kuwaiti oil field was blown up by Saddam Hussein. Global analysts and think-tanks proclaimed it would take 5 years to cap them all off and restart the Kuwait oil pumping industry. Well, the Kuwaiti’s and Saudi’s called Texans, who had them all capped and back in working order in 6 months.
We are a nation that knows how to get shit done.
A few more years pass, and the Northern Chile mine workers were trapped two miles underground. The eyes of the world began to tear as the word spread. Most began to whisper no one could save them. Who did they call for help? A bunch of hick miners from USA coal country who went down there, worked on the fly, engineered the rescue equipment on site, and saved every one of them.
Yup, that’s our America. Ingenuity born from freedom. //
The problem is we are no longer the America that produced the guys who put out the Kuwaiti oil field fires and rescued Chilean miners. We are a nation that has permitted its primary and secondary education system to be dumbed down to the lowest conceivable denominator and made a high school diploma a participation trophy...and we're trying to do that to our university systems. We don't care about performance or standards, and our traditional work ethic is probably an artifact of white supremacy. //
NightTwister
14 hours ago
What a huge pile of crap. They want to import "engineers" from other countries because they can pay them half the going wage. They're mostly entry-level capable, and companies no longer care if they can actually do the work. For the most part they can't innovate, so they're used for repeatable work. They live 4-5 to a home, and send most of their money back home. This is not an "America First" strategy.
When Trump was in last time he increased the minimum H1B visa salary to $120K. When Biden changed it to $60K which it was before, they flooded in again. Raise the minimum to $150K and you'll suddenly see there are plenty of Americans available for these jobs.
On 2023-10-16, Marc Andreessen, (creator of Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and general partner of superstar venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) published a 5200 word document, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto 6”, proclaiming technology as the root of all human progress since our species emerged from the forager lifestyle and absolutely essential to the achievement of the human destiny now and in the future, here on Earth and onward to the stars. //
I agree with just about everything in this manifesto (can you guess my lone quibble?). I wish I’d written it. I wish I wrote so well. This is well worth your time to read and digest. We are engaged in a struggle for the future. Andreessen clearly identifies the enemy.
“We just had a midair,” the pilot of the Hawker is heard saying in an audio recording posted on LiveATC.net, which shares live and archived recordings of air traffic control radio transmissions.
Someone in the control tower responds by saying, “Say what?”
“You guys cleared somebody to take off or land, and we hit them on a departure,” the Hawker pilot says.
The recent accident in Houston is just the latest noteworthy instance in what a major New York Times investigation this summer determined to be “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.” According to internal records of the Federal Aviation Agency, the Times reported that these safety lapses and near misses occurred as a “result of human error.” The Times report further revealed that “runway incursions” of the sort described above have nearly doubled, from 987 to 1732, despite the widespread proliferation of advanced technologies. //
While the disturbing decline in aviation safety is complex and multifaceted, we identified two major contributing factors that have received scant media attention. The first such factor is the likely contribution of disastrous COVID-era policies to the staffing shortage of many air traffic control rooms. The second factor is that aggressive affirmative action policies implemented during the Obama administration have resulted in a catastrophic collapse in the quality of controllers. In short, COVID policies have gutted the quantity of air traffic controllers, and diversity policies have gutted the quality of air traffic controllers, creating unprecedented danger for the aviation industry. //
The implications of these findings reach far beyond the scope of aviation, as important as this industry is. Rather, the collapse of the aviation industry must be understood in the context of a broader collapse in our ability to maintain the infrastructure of a First World society. This is a major and significant trend that we highlighted years ago in our coverage of the repeated failures of Texas’ electric power grid.
Buying cobalt doesn't make US firms liable for abuses in DR Congo, court rules. //
Apple and other major tech companies don't have to compensate victims of forced child labor that provided cobalt for the lithium-ion batteries used in many electronic devices, a US appeals court ruled. The lawsuit filed by former miners from the Democratic Republic of the Congo alleged that Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla violated a trafficking law that makes it illegal to participate in a "venture" that engages in forced labor.
"The plaintiffs allege the technology companies participated in a venture with their cobalt suppliers by purchasing the metal through the global supply chain," the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit noted in its ruling issued yesterday.
A US District Court previously dismissed the lawsuit, and a panel of three appeals court judges unanimously affirmed the dismissal yesterday. "Purchasing an unspecified amount of cobalt through the global supply chain is not 'participation in a venture' within the meaning of the TVPRA [Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008]," the ruling said. "We therefore affirm the district court's dismissal of the complaint." //
The plaintiffs' argument was a little more nuanced that, arguing not that buying cobalt in and of itself is the problem, but that these tech firms are demanding so much cobalt and at such cutthroat prices that they're inducing the mining companies into employing children to meet demand and margins because that's the only way they can satisfy the demand at the prices paid.
Legally it's still probably the "correct" outcome, but morally it's pretty hard not to find some fault with these incredibly profitable tech companies pretty knowingly using their market muscle to drive these sorts of atrocities. They could do better if they wanted to.
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