That tickled a memory of a video... and I hunted it up.
Adam Savage's Tested : Look Inside Apple's $130 USB-C Cable - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5aAd8Oy84 (1 minute in "we've been saying that our phones have more computing power than the Apollo guidance computer but I'm positive now that this cable has more computing power than the Apollo guidance computer")
That video is a look at cables (not just Apple's) with Lumafield's CT Scan.
Lumifield quite recently showed on Adam Savage's Tested again, with some literal insights on a reasonably-diverse array of different 18650 cells: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5aAd8Oy84
It's a good watch, and I learned some new stuff about some things that I only knew a little bit about before.
> Researchers have found between a low of 5 to 1 to a high of 100 to 1 ratios in programmer performance. This means
that programmers at the same level, with similar backgrounds and comparable salaries, might take 1 to 100 weeks to complete the same tasks. [21, p. 8]
> The ratio of programmer performance that repeatedly appeared in the studies investigated by Bill Curtis in the July/August 1990 issue of American Programmer was 22 to 1. This was both for source lines of code produced and for debugging times - which includes both defect detection rate and defect removal efficiency. [5, pp. 4 - 6] The NNPP also produces a higher instance of defects in the work product. Figure 1 shows the consequences of the NNPPs.
The reference to 21 is Shneiderman, Ben Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1980) and 5 is Curtis, Bill, "Managing the Real Leverage in Software Productivity and Quality", American Programmer July/August
1990
There's also mention of DeMarco and Lister in some literature... which means Peopleware.
From there:
> While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations.
> H. D. Mills, Software Productivity (New York: Dorset House Publishing, 1988), p. 266.
> Our study found that there were huge differences between the 92 competing organizations. Over the whole sample, the best organization (the one with the best average performance of its representatives) worked more than ten times faster than the worst organization. In addition to their speed, all competitors from the fastest organization developed code that passed the major acceptance test.
> This is more than a little unsettling. Managers for years have affected a certain fatalism about individual differences. They reasoned that the differences were innate, so you couldn’t do much about them. It’s harder to be fatalistic about the clustering effect. Some companies are doing a lot worse than others. Something about their environment and corporate culture is failing to attract and keep good people or is making it impossible for even good people to work effectively.
A friend of mine back in college was a minesweeper addict - he'd play it all the time on the computer lab staff machine (where he worked) when it was quiet but the manager eventually took all the games off all the machines.
As he was learning how to program at the time, he decided to undertake writing minesweeper that he could play from a telnet session from the library or one of the vt100 terminals in the lab. And yes, he also had difficulty with the chording logic. He called it "super click" (that code is in clear.c). Part of the initial challenge was since he was taking this as his first project and before really reading the K&R everything was a one dimensional array (>.<) and there was a lot of multiplication and addition (and division and modulus).
While converting it is not economical, class c office space (which is least desirable) demand is probably gone in this market due to lackluster demand for office space; the value of the building will get zeroed out by the market, at which point it can trade hands, be demo'd, and new residential can go up in its place.
You can think of class c office space, broadly speaking, as oil wells that have very little life left, and get bought up by folks who intend to extract the cashflow until they dump the externality on the public government and taxpayers (like abandoned shopping malls).
A recent example in St Louis is the AT&T office tower [1] [2].
[1] One of St. Louis’ tallest office towers, empty for years, sells for less than 2% of its peak price - https://www.costar.com/article/642008108/one-of-st-louis-tal... - April 10th, 2024 ("Goldman Group buys 44-story former AT&T office tower for $3.6 Million")
IIRC, that article mentioned older buildings tend to be more convertible to residential, because of their layouts, and modern office buildings (with giant open floor spaces for seas of cubicles) are almost impossible to convert.
There should probably building code changes to ban the latter type of office building, and keep the space more flexible and convertible to residential. A big plus is the resulting office space would probably be nicer to workers.
There are multiple groups on Stack Overflow with different (and sometimes conflicting) goals and desires.
Corporate measured "engagement" and has been trying things to make that number go up.
The curators of the site... if they could have tools to measure would be measuring the median quality of the questions being asked and the answers being given.
People asking questions on the site have changed from the "building a library goal" with the question as a prompt to "help me with this problem" - but rarely not sticking around.
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The sinking activity rates have had alarms going for many years... but remember that engagement was being measured and while that's sinking, comments were engagement so the numbers (ad impressions) at corporate level were getting measured differently.
The reputation has been something, but there's a disconnect between what "hostile" means and what "toxic" means between the people making the claims and how it's being interpreted.
That reputation was interpreted (by corporate and to an extent, diamond moderators) as "people are mean in comments" - and that isn't the case. People are not mean in comments. However, the structure of the site being focused on Q&A rather than discussion for someone who wants discussion with the people who are there to provide answers to questions will find the environment innately hostile.
Without changing the site from a Q&A (and basically starting over - which corporate has tried, but the people who are providing quality answers aren't going there because they don't want discussions - if they wanted discussions they would be commenting on HN or Reddit), that change can't really be done. The attempts to try to change how people are approaching the site run into a "this would reduce 'engagement'" and people asking questions to get help for their problem not accepting the original premise of building a library. ... And that's resulted in conflict and decreasing curation (which are often the people who were the ones providing the expert answers).
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So while they have been aware, (I believe) corporate has been trying to solve the wrong problems at odds with both the people asking questions ("help me now") and the remaining curators.
>So while they have been aware, (I believe) corporate has been trying to solve the wrong problems at odds with both the people asking questions ("help me now") and the remaining curators.
StackOverflow as built back in the days of Web 2.0 where the idea was that user generated content formed in the days of the (relatively) altruistic web.
There isn't any clean way to do "contributor gets paid" without adding in an entire mess of "ok, where is the money coming from? Paywalls? Advertising? Subscriptions?" and then also get into the mess of international money transfers (how do you pay someone in Iran from the US?)
And then add in the "ok, now the company is holding payment information of everyone(?) ..." and data breaches and account hacking is now so much more of an issue.
Once you add money to it, the financial inceptives and gamification collide to make it simply awful.
Trying to say "give us your payment and tax information so that we can pay you $0.13 for your contributions" would be even more insulting than not paying anyone.
Doing renumeration for people in some countries could get legally challenging too.
> During the 2024 general election campaign, allegations were made that illicit bets were placed by political party members and police officers, some of whom may have had insider knowledge of the date of the general election before Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister at the time, publicly announced when it would be held.
> ...
> In April 2025, the Gambling Commission charged 15 people with offences under Section 42 of the Gambling Act 2005, including Russell George, Tony Lee, Nick Mason, Laura Saunders, and Craig Williams. Trials are not expected to begin until September 2027 or January 2028.
> But alarms were raised Thursday morning, hours before the royal appearance, when a run of bets for brown started coming in, displacing light blue as the favorite.
> "Nobody was backing brown at all and suddenly everyone wanted in on it," Paddy Power (search), owner of the eponymous chain of betting shops that inaugurated the hat bet 10 years ago, told The Times.
> Power's odds on brown went from 12-1, to 2-1, to even and finally to 8-11 before he yanked the bet at 11:30 a.m., 2½ hours before the Queen was due to show.
> "Someone must have been in the know. We laid 50 pounds at 20-1 and 200 pounds at 10-1 and some smaller bets," David Hood, spokesman for rival betting chain William Hill (search), told the Daily Telegraph.
> ...
> When Elizabeth II finally made her appearance, she was indeed wearing a brown hat with cream trim.
> "Somebody has made a tidy sum," sniffed Hood.
> Both he and Power, who estimated his firm lost about 10,000 pounds, or $18,000, suspected palace insiders.
The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a host must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
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