abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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The hydro plant for my city doesn't even have a reservoir. It's just on a river that flows down a mountain. And 99.999% of the water doesn't go through any turbines.

Having said that - it doesn't produce enough power for the city, let alone spare to be wasted on other things.

Some CFMEU union jobs pay massive salaries to... stand around and chat with your mates.

For example they just fixed a water leak under the footpath outside our office. It took about 3 months and there were often five workers standing around doing almost nothing at all for days at a time.

When I had a water leak at home, we didn't call a union construction company, we called a sole trader. It took one guy two hours to fix the leak, and he charged his "emergency work" rate, which I'm pretty sure was half the price a CFMEU company would have charged just to give us a quote for the job.

Unfortunately the building industry can't possibly survive without the unions and red tape.

The lack of compliance, on everything from worker safety to common sense things like "make sure this wall is actually strong enough to stay upright", is horrifically poor and would be so much worse if builders were given more freedom.

This. I know OP asked for old shows, but Bluey is so good you can (luckily) watch the same episode a hundred times over and still enjoy it.

Skip the first season though - it was clearly run on a shoe string budget and doesn't have nearly the same quality as season two onwards. Go back and watch it when you're a fan.

Programmers write parsers quite a lot

Speak for yourself. I've done it exactly once. It didn't work, and never shipped. Learned my lesson and always use a parser that someone else wrote. Usually a big team of at least thousands of people (how many people have worked on JSON? Millions? What about UTF8? Those are the main two I use).

The world is full of tech companies that pay stock options/etc, if that's how you want to be paid then you can do that.

Personally I have no interest in that at all and have always turned it down. If I'm going to own shares in a company, then I want voting rights. Nothing worse than watching investment be run by someone you disagree with... actually there is something worse. A company where every single employee has control/voting rights. That would be a complete disaster.

Um... if someone pays you to do a thing, then they own it. Imagine if you paid me a hundred thousand dollars to build a house and then it's my house to live in. Doesn't make any sense at all.

I'm not defending the company, but the law is pretty clear on this. If you want to own your own work, then start your own company.

These days I use ChatGPT 4, with a long running conversation where I explain what I'm trying to do, what tools I'm using, paste in sections of code that I don't understand, asking how to change the behaviour of that code, give it error messages I'm seeing, etc.

It feels really close to pair programming with someone sitting next to me who knows the language/framework. The code it writes is often wrong but it's close enough that I can work reasonably efficiently.

A couple favourite from earlier todays

1. I asked "where can I find the code that does X" and it told me to search the project for "Y" to find it.
2. I asked it how to use a code generation shell script bundled with the framework to do a common task, and when I explained that the answer didn't seem to line up it said "in that case you can't use the script. You'll need to write the code manually, here's how to do that"

Both pieces of advice were spot on and saved me hours of googling.

This chart is pretty shocking, and makes IEA look like idiots. Or maybe it's malice? The IEA's founding purpose was to protect the Oil industry. Supposedly they now also work to "promote clean energy transitions"... but if that's their goal they don't seem to be doing a very good job.

The worst industry for this is school teachers.

At least in QLD, they are officially paid to work 5 hours a day which is ridiculous since kids are at the school for 6 hours a day and teachers don't get a one hour lunch break. Oh yeah, and a lot of their job can't possibly be done while students are in the room.

All teachers do unpaid overtime, which is OK since they are paid more than almost anyone else would get if they only worked 5 hours... but the issue is some teachers, because of the subjects or students they're assigned to, have to do significantly more overtime than they should be doing. And they don't get any pay for the overtime nor do they really have any choice other than trying to switch to a new school. Which often means uprooting your whole family and living somewhere else.

A better analogy is writing vs writing.

Do you know how to hold a pen and draw letters? You can write. Do you want to write a best selling novel? Yeah that's a different skill.

Part of the investment has to be only using libraries that have type hints.

But yeah - I definitely prefer strongly typed languages. Or at least languages like Swift where you have to jump through a few hoops to have a dynamic type (in Swift there is an "Any" type but you have to write a bunch of code checking what the variable contains before you can actually worth with it). Basically you have to convert it to a static typed variable before it can be touched. Thankfully there's pretty good syntax for that. Including an arbitrary way to convert almost anything to a string (essential for debugging).

Programmers are not hackers. The reverse might be true but hacking is about finding problems (and exploiting them) while programming is about fixing problems.

You have to find a problem before you can fix it. All good programmers are hackers.

Currently the obvious tell is if they pitch Rust

I would amend that to "if they pitch any language".

The best language is almost universally "whatever we already use" or for new projects "whatever the team is most familiar with". It should occasionally be reconsidered, and definitely try out new languages, but actually switching to the new language after trying it out? That should be very very rare.

Honestly, I think contacts are the best option. The Zeiss lenses move the headset slightly heavier and worse move it further away from your face creating a lever action amplifying the weight issue.

You can still wear glasses. Just don't put a prescription in them.

Personally I love my glasses and have never tried contacts, but I think I'll switch to contacts when this product category is more mature.

It’s funny too because at the same time AI promises a very different future where screens are less important. Tasks that require computers could be done by voice command or other minimal interfaces

Apple seems to be the only major tech company that still believes in that future. Microsoft has killed Cortana entirely and all of their AI work is now focused on enhancing ordinary every day computing, Google and Amazon have both been cutting features and laying off staff for their voice assistants. Which means right now, the only serious entrants in that space are Apple and a bunch of startups.

From what I can see, Vision OS is perfectly suited to it. You can go about your day without any computing, ask your voice assistant a question, see the answer, dismiss it, and move on, without taking devices out of your pocket or sitting down at a desk. What's clearly not ready for that is the hardware - it's too big, too heavy, the battery life isn't good enough, the viewing angle is too narrow, too expensive, etc etc.

The other thing missing is Apple's voice assistant is clearly falling behind. It has always worked well for simple commands but that doesn't cut it any more. Tim Cook has said they have more to announce on that front "later this year" and it's worth noting that Apple has bought 21 AI companies in the last several years. All they have to show for that is the ability to search for "dog" in your photo library. Clearly they're working on something more meaningful and it seems pretty obvious that a better Siri is going to ship sooner rather than later.

My best guess is Siri has fallen behind because all of their best staff are working on something to replace it.

Apple Vision Pro, I think, is two products:

1. An immersive content viewing experience - movies, photos, games, etc
2. An experimental new computing platform that developers can potentially use to build great things

The second won't really pay off until the hardware is better. But the first is good enough justification to ship this product now, even though it's nowhere near achieving it's potential.

This new legislation comes into effect next month. So sure, "not yet", but very soon.

Specifically I wanted to know which apps would be able to communicate with WhatsApp

WhatsApp will allow any service to communicate with their network. But wether or not any do is entirely up to those other apps. I think there's very little chance Signal will ever interoperate with anything for example. iMessage surely won't either.

Technically it shouldn't be difficult, because almost every chat app these days uses the same protocol (Signal which is an unofficial industry standard and soon to be an official one). The question is how well it fits with their business model. And most companies don't share their business model.

The other issue is the recipient needs to opt in. You won't be able to send messages to just anyone... and if spam is an issue then everyone might turn it off.

The bigger question for me is wether or not you will be able to use a third party app to access WhatsApp. As in full access, view all messages, view contacts, create messages, receive push notifications, etc etc. It looks like the DMA might allow a return to software like Adium which is an open source messaging app that used to be able to log into almost any messaging service. These days none of the most popular services are available in the app, so almost nobody uses it.

I don't think they've said what the license will be.

Instead of doing most shit in-house, they contracted out shit tons of parts to the lowest bidder

No that's not true. What happened is they found things that were not profitable to do in-house and sold those off (they found investors willing to take over their non-profitable production lines).

... the investors simply cut costs in order to make it profitable. Which is predictable, what else were they going to do? Obviously an investor expects to make money on their investment.

Now Boeing is basically stuck - they can't make the parts in house, because they don't have enough staff, and their only supplier sucks, and there is no other supplier.