It happened to my father, who was suffering a severe mental decline because of hydrocephalus. After weeks of trying to figure out what happened, one day he was sitting in the hospital perfectly fine, talking normally. I remember being so relieved. But then the next day he was back to not knowing anything and being half aware. He died a few weeks later.
totally believe you, but i guess i feel like that is different from spontaneous temporary recovery from a long-term neurodegenerative disorder. i'm sorry for your loss.
There's meaning in the term "car wash" that it understands. But I don't suspect anyone has taught it that for 99.9% of people, going to car wash ONLY means that you're going to wash your car and that it should make that implicit assumption.
What if you're the car wash owner? Or a maintenance technician? Pretty easy to just walk over there if you're just 50ft away.
> uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own
I constantly reiterate to people, whether they're reporting to me or not, that they need to speak up when there's a blocker. I feel its a very telling skill of engineers whether or not they can communicate issues in an effective manner urgently and figure out the best course of action to unblock.
I've heard tales of 300k/yr engineers that just sit there and wait for a manager to ask if they're blocked, or just sit there until they're told what to do.
> I've heard tales of 300k/yr engineers that just sit there and wait for a manager to ask if they're blocked, or just sit there until they're told what to do.
This is widely presumed to reflect reality within a 1-2 degrees of separation from myself as well as from many of the people I speak to. Part of the problem is that there is always plausible deniability. Like the adage of how unwise it is to fire custodians just because you never see a mess and therefore you never actually see the custodians do anything, it may be "unwise" to lose the presence of these 300k/yr engineers just because they somehow actually keep things going smoothly.
> I constantly reiterate to people, whether they're reporting to me or not, that they need to speak up when there's a blocker.
This is presuming a particular/healthy culture where open communication is valued, appreciated, and not punished. This is not always the case, and an "objective description of a blocker" could result in some bruised egos where it transforms into blame upon some person or team for being or causing the blocker. People who experienced these cultures may be waiting for private conversations (such as 1-on-1s) that minimizes the risk, and they may be waiting to identify you (or whomever they are talking to) as a person who could make communicate the nature of the blockage in a politically favorable or neutral manner. All of this may be happening without the people involved consciously aware of this behavior of pushing out information through private conversations. And this maintains plausible deniability for ALL parties. The person who is blocked is never identified. The person who may have been the blocker is never identified. And hopefully everything gets fixed before anything is actually worth escalating.
> Like the adage of how unwise it is to fire custodians just because you never see a mess and therefore you never actually see the custodians do anything, it may be "unwise" to lose the presence of these 300k/yr engineers just because they somehow actually keep things going smoothly.
so you should keep people on pay-roll because they "might actually be doing something if you look hard enough" ...? don't think so
> People who experienced these cultures may be waiting for private conversations
the error is the "waiting" - if you have a problem it is your responsibility to do something about it
> so you should keep people on pay-roll because they "might actually be doing something if you look hard enough" ...? don't think so
The point was that you might be making incorrect assumptions that they aren’t doing work, and you might be making incorrect assumptions that replacing them will cost less. Looking busy and knowing what to do are two different things.
> I feel its a very telling skill of engineers whether or not they can communicate issues in an effective manner urgently and figure out the best course of action to unblock.
I could be this person that appears not communicate, but the reason is because I've never had a manager that could unblock me faster than if I didn't tell anyone and just did it myself. For the longest time, every manager I've ever had was mostly useless (for unblocking some issue), it took quite a few years before I got an EM that actually makes shit happen. Only then did it become a habit I had to break.
It doesn't make sense to tell someone who can't or won't help you that you're blocked on something. Eventually you just default to never asking.
Read other comments: Even engineers with 10+ years of experience don't know how to do this, think they have it all under control, then complain that management only hindered them. And if we are talking from experience, based on mine, only 2/10 good engineers actually know how to communicate results besides just delivering code/artifacts.
In some particular cases and SMALL groups I do think a Manager by itself is unnecessary, especially if everything is working out and they are responsible enough to present usable information to others in the hierarchy, but if not, please stop this fighting and only complain when the Manager is really annoying.
If you think they are robbing you of valuable time, time it. Time it and tell them with hard data you're being robbed of at least a certain % of your working time, which means you can probably deliver less if they want X action from you.
Yes exactly! Devs resist asking for help when they need it, and this is why as a manager I have to insist on asking questions to discover blockers.
I can see why this happens, and I was (and still sometimes I am) guilty of thinking as long as I have a little more time, I can solve the problem myself. We are all capable of figuring out how things work, we all want to learn, and we all have fears that admitting spending time spinning our wheels might reflect poorly or reveal weaknesses, and/or might be used against us in reviews.
Part of making people feel comfortable surfacing blockers is making sure the environment is supporting that behavior. Devs need to be rewarded for working together, and rewarded for being proactive about telling their manager or the team they need help on something. If these highly paid engineers have had negative experiences in the past, they might have learned not to bring otherwise important issues to light. Occasionally there are also people who learn what they can get away with and will optimize for the minimum.
IMO, the environment also needs to allow devs some space to go slow for a while, solve unfamiliar problems, and learn new things - so for me there’s a certain amount of being okay with blockers, when people are still being proactive. I’d rather talk about them than not and make a conscious decision, but I do try to be sensitive to what I label as blocker.
Nobody has ever found the slightest smidgen of evidence of aliens, nor any plausible theory of what aliens would be like. It's about as likely as someone inventing a car that runs on water.
Plenty of evidence has been found. For one, the US government has leaked/released a video showing instant acceleration of a flying object. Nothing on earth can do that.
You're heaping one implausibility (aliens) in with another implausibility (violating the laws of physics) making the combined plausibility indistinguishable from zero.
It's not necessary for me to debunk your theory. It is incumbent upon you to prove it valid.
While it's always good to elevate evidence-based knowledge above "woo" or "belief", it's not healthy to close your mind off completely against anything that isn't currently proven. We might know that we don't know a lot of things, but the most interesting thought experiments happen in the area that concerns the things we don't know that we don't know.
One can go to /r/UFOs and see plenty of "interesting thought experiments" happening in that area, and while that might be entertaining, it isn't compelling.
I think closing one's mind off 99.999% to "it's aliens" is perfectly healthy and justified. When you remove the folklore, memes, psyops and apply Occaam's Razor to the "evidence" and sort out mistaken natural phenomena, misinterpreted data, classified but terrestrial technology and outright hoaxes, you aren't left with much of anything, and certainly nothing definite. There is no reason to assume the phenomenon mentioned in the linked paper demonstrates the presence of alien spacecraft but the UFO community is going to run with it anyway.
Call me when David Grusch comes through with that "catastrophic disclosure" we were promised or when Lue Elizondo can tell the difference between a starship and a chandelier. This is just Bob Lazar and Majestic-12 all over again.
When an engineer tells me he built a car that runs on water, he'd better bring some pretty amazing evidence. And no, I'm not going to waste time reading his paper looking for the inevitable flaw, either.
I've heard "evidence" of aliens my entire life. Guess how many panned out. Zero. But that never seems to discourage anyone from believing that an artifact on a photo must have the most implausible explanation ever - aliens!
Where do you draw the line? Time travel? Teleportation? Astrology? Fortune tellers? Razor blade sharpening? Reincarnation?
Last year, there was a period of a week or two where I would see Gemini responses diffusing in. I don't know if they were experimenting with it, or if it was just an effect. It didn't last long, but it was interesting to see.
I built an algorithmic trader years ago just using Python, but for the hot paths I gave each algorithm its own function in its own file, and then I would compile the files with Cython. The speedup was pretty significant. I barely wrote any "Cython" stuff (meaning declaring variables and other minor assists). The code is still very much python, just with a few little extras that are easy to understand.
> Inaccurate rescues - jobs that are long-running might get rescued even if the producer is still alive. Pro version uses smarter heartbeats to track producer liveness.
So the non-paid version really can't be used for production unless you know for sure you'll have very short jobs?
You can have jobs that run as long as you like. The difference is purely in how quickly they are restored after a crash or a shutdown that doesn’t wait long enough.
From multiple personal experiences, including both of my parents, dementia is a slow, horrible death where you are robbed of your dignity and end up dragging all of your relatives through a very long, very torturous hell. You will be drooling, pissing, and shitting yourself, all while slowly reverting back to a low IQ childhood mentality where you're very likely to have outbursts and verbally or physically attack the people around you. Your loved ones will be tormented, and if you don't have loved ones then if you're lucky you'll be tossed into a room and forgotten about by underpaid, overworked staff at some run-down nursing home. If you're not lucky you'll be laying in a gutter on the street until you die.
Interestingly my wife helped a friend whose father had the disease during the pandemic.
He had worked as a professor and after retirement had suffered with AD for years but had stayed "independent" because his wife was high functioning mentally but low functioning physically and formed a good team.
He'd bought long term care insurance so he had the resources to afford both a room at a care home but also personal help from home aides, including my wife. He didn't really know what was going on most of the time but he never got angry or flustered and was always pleasant to deal with.
We had trouble with certain homes having a way they want to do things or requiring things that weren't really necessary, one insisted that he get a pacemaker because he had bradycardia. When he lived with his son between homes probably the most difficult thing was that he got up in the night to use the bathroom and would end up urinating in the wrong place. He got much better care than many residents because people were always coming around to see him and the staff knew that we cared and would advocate for him.
He passed away at 92 and outlived many of the people who knew him at work so he had just a small memorial ceremony. I saw it as an example of healthy aging and talked about it a lot with my wife -- and it made me think about myself and my own fear that my ability to compensate for my schizotaxia may degrade when my brain degrades and I can picture myself becoming really nasty and it gives me all the more incentive to rewrite my habits while I still can.
Sadly, cancer isn’t one singular disease. Types of cancer can be excruciatingly painful for many years, which is also tormenting to everyone around you. I wouldn’t wish either on anyone.
"be critical, but correct. I don't want affirmation, i want to actually accomplish things."
I don't get any sycophancy from it. The conversations are actually quite good, and it'll push back if it thinks I'm wrong.
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