I don’t think anything you said is wrong, but I do think you’re misreading the intent of the channel.
Practical Engineering is very deliberately framed as edutainment. The animations, pacing, and level of depth are conscious choices meant to keep non-specialists engaged rather than to maximize technical rigor.
In that sense, it belongs alongside other popular "science-y" channels like Kurzgesagt, Vsauce, and Technology Connections: content that prioritizes narrative and engagement over completeness or instruction.
The target audience is the broad middle of the technical bell curve. Animations of runway layers may make the video less appealing to you, but more accessible to a much larger, less technical audience.
Different goals imply different success criteria. If the goal is reach rather than comprehensive education, a million views in seven days looks like success.
+1, Todoist has changed things for me drastically.
I was diagnosed with ADHD a year and a half ago in my ~mid 30s. The meds (Vyvanse) help somewhat, but the real key to improvement for me has been using Todoist.
IME the real trick is using it consistently, and for everything. My routines (e.g. morning routine: meds, eat, coffee, brush teeth, brush the dog's teeth, etc etc) are all in Todoist, not because I struggle to focus on getting that stuff done in the morning (well, sometimes, perhaps) but because starting the day with do-easy-thing, mark-it-done, repeat, sets up the rest of the day to be run by Todoist instead of the bit of my brain that goes "I know we should be getting ready to leave but WHAT IF YOU WROTE AN APP TO DO THIS COOL THING, JUST QUICKLY TRY THAT NOW, YOU CAN LEAVE AFTER".
I had a similar experience with org-mode too. It was great at work where I'm at my desk all day, and made a huge difference, but not having a good mobile experience makes it impractical for day-to-day home use.
That was 100% the key for me too: put absolutely everything into it that I can’t address immediately, both work and life.
I did use org-mode like that too (all of life into it, not just work) when I was working from home but both capture and viewing when away from the laptop just had too much friction.
How about a site which parses your credit card / bank statement to find out where you're spending money and provides tips to save cash based on that spending (which could be sourced from community submissions + voting)
E.g. I buy supermarket gift cards from a slightly obscure site which sells them at a 5% discount. Super easy way to save a few hundred dollars a year. The hardest thing was discovering that this was an option.
> I'm not understanding why TFA author has such an attitude about this
To me it reads like an ego trip rather than any kind of righteous vendetta against the author. Implicit in "look at the dumb thing this other person did" is "I'm smarter than them because I noticed the dumb thing".
While I agree with your general sentiment, the 10 key being on the "wrong" side could be good, perhaps, in some cases?
Historically I've done some heavy spreadsheet work where the resting position of my hands which minimizes movement is right hand on the mouse, left hand on the 10 keys. On a normal keyboard that has the disadvantage of causing a "closed" posture which isn't entirely comfortable.
Outside of that kind of niche use case though, it definitely feels like a strange choice for developers.
NFC tags in custom "avatars" unique to and customizable by each kid, turning friends into collectables? I would've been all over that in my early teens.
In the spirit of genuine curiosity, who is making you feel like less of a person wrt the choice of main/master, and how are they doing that?
It sounds like you're saying that git maintainers are intending for you to feel like less of a person because you don't agree with their choice, but I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion.
A train can go from "cruising speed" to letting passengers off to escape a fire in about a minute.
A plane might take anywhere from five minutes to several hours to be able to safely let passengers out.
Personally I feel that's a good enough reason to impose more robust restrictions on Things Which May Cause Fire on planes compared to trains. Especially in the case of lithium batteries where they're more or less impossible to extinguish one they're going.
I agree with the concept of comparing risk being the meaningful approach, but I disagree this is how you go about measuring risk. How many people are being injured/killed per million km or something is the type of metric. Air travel far exceeds those types of metrics vs other common modes of travel, yet is always the first one to be further focused on how bad it could potentially be.
I would argue at the performance of aviation safety, and the constant focus on how bad it could be, is exactly why aviation is safe. The day that we decide to stop focussing on what could go wrong, is the day that aviation stops being safe.
For example, if aircraft come within five nautical miles or I think it’s 1000 vertical feet, it’s considered a very serious incident. Not because anyone is in danger at five nautical miles or 1000 vertical feet, but because if you don’t draw the line there, and treat that barrier as seriously as if two aircraft had collided, then there isn’t really a barrier at all.
> > The day that we decide to stop focussing on what could go wrong, is the day that aviation stops being safe
A rebalancing vis a vis cars, buses, ships and trains is due. All the effort and man hours wasted trying to clear the last 0.01% in aviation would be better spent focusing on the other means of transportation, or other stuff that actually kills people period. The goal is not to die period. Not avoiding dying of aviation crash, and planes are about the last culprit as far as stuff that kills people worldwide on a yearly basis.
They are far behind dogs, actually my intuition says that they are behind a very calm and friendly breed such as German Shepherds, they are calm and friendly alright but as far as dog breeds worldwide for sure they kill > 200 people yearly.
I'd board a 95% plane if it means that once landed I could step on a 95% safe train or bus. Or a 95% safe city for that matter , Instead now the values are:
Plane : 99.9999999% safe
Train: 80% safe depending on the city and amount of crime in subway
Bus : 70% safe again depending on the city and amount of crime
City as a whole: Between crime, 6000 puounds vehicles speeding through the streets etc...I guess much less than 70%
The cognitive dissonance of people living in urban hells where crime is rampant and risk of death from assault , robbery or outright murder and then being afraid of flying tells you all you need to know. And no, it doesn't happen solely in Africa....San Francisco is a good example of that.
Naturally it's why it's so much safer, but the options for air travel safety most certainly aren't uniquely only between "as safe as possible" or "not safe at all". It should be no different than how we weigh safety regulation for any other mode of travel, and this kind of "either we do everything possible or we won't have safety" instead of focusing purely on what the measured target should be and how we currently measure against it is precisely the irrationality around it.
It's holding the global economy back actually who cares about the global economy...it's holding our personal happiness by making flight more expensive than it should be.
If I want to fly somewhere I already know that once I land there I face a considerable risk when I get in the metropolis. Risk of illness, violence, assault etc. Some metropolis are worse and some are better but the risk is always there.
The plane is the least of my problems.
The monopoly of aircraft production and the fact that planes can be used everywhere in the world is forcing us to withstand the same level of risk tolerance as the U.S. , and not even avg U.S citizen....for obvious reasons due to what happened theatrically some 25 years ago the risk tolerance of aviation is forced to be the same as Billionaire's Row , Central Park West , NYC, NY and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.
On the other hand...trains get to do this and nobody cares because they are local not global:
Yes, of course that’s my point. We have to draw large safety margins around these systems, and then we have to treat incidents that breach those margins as seriously as we would an actual collision.
Practical Engineering is very deliberately framed as edutainment. The animations, pacing, and level of depth are conscious choices meant to keep non-specialists engaged rather than to maximize technical rigor.
In that sense, it belongs alongside other popular "science-y" channels like Kurzgesagt, Vsauce, and Technology Connections: content that prioritizes narrative and engagement over completeness or instruction.
The target audience is the broad middle of the technical bell curve. Animations of runway layers may make the video less appealing to you, but more accessible to a much larger, less technical audience.
Different goals imply different success criteria. If the goal is reach rather than comprehensive education, a million views in seven days looks like success.
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