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submitted 2 months ago by slazer2au@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?

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[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 95 points 2 months ago

For any non-trivial software project, spending time on code quality and a good architecture is worth the effort. Every hour I spend on that saves me two hours when I have to fix bugs or implement new features.

Years ago I had to review code from a different team and it was an absolute mess. They (and our boss) defended it with "That way they can get it done faster. We can clean up after the initial release". Guess what, that initial release took over three years instead of the planned six months.

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[-] rowinxavier@lemmy.world 63 points 2 months ago

I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else's life and shit your own values all over them.

I don't drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.

My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.

The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.

[-] RebekahWSD@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago

Disabled people are so often treated like children and it just sucks.

[-] tal@lemmy.today 8 points 2 months ago

Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others ("I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows"), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there's gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes "seriously affecting others", and there's going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you're not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.

However.

I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it's reasonable for those other people to say "I am willing to buy you food, but I don't want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision." That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn't.

I think that there's a qualitative difference between saying "I don't want to pay to buy someone else alcohol" and "I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they've bought themselves."

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[-] flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 53 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Not strictly technical, although organizational science might be seen as a technical field on it's own.

Regularly rotating people between teams is desirable.

Many companies just assign you in a team and that's where you're stuck forever unti you quit. In slightly better places they will try to find a "perfect match" for you.

What I'm saying is that moving people around is even better:
You spread institutional knowledge around.
You keep everyone engaged. Typically on a new job you learn for the first few months, then you have a peak of productivity when you have all the new ideas. After some 2 years you either reach a plateau or complacency.

[-] Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

I'm in health sciences and I wish we would do more education days/conferences. I'm a med lab tech and I feel like no one knows what the lab actually does, they just send samples off and the magic lab gremlins Divine these numbers/results. I feel the same way when another discipline discusses what they do, its always interesting!

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[-] DasFaultier@sh.itjust.works 47 points 2 months ago

Not everything needs to be deployed to a cluster of georedundant K8s nodes, not everything needs to be a container, Docker is not always necessary. Just run the damn binary. Just build a .deb package.

(Disclaimer: yes, all those things can have merit and reasons. Doesn't mean you have to shove them into everything.)

[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

But then how will I ship my machine seeing as it works for me?

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[-] Godnroc@lemmy.world 44 points 2 months ago

Cleaning, organizing, and documentation are high priorities.

Every job I've worked at has had mountains of "The last guy didn't..." that you walk into and it's always a huge pain in the ass. They didn't throw out useless things, they didn't bother consolidating storage rooms, and they never wrote down any of their processes, procedures, or rationals. I've spent many hours at each job just detangling messes because the other person was to busy or thought it unimportant and didn't bother to spend the time.

Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.

[-] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago

Starting a new job soon, and I’m paying for some holes in documentation as I prep my offboarding documentation for my current team. Definitely making it a priority to do better going forward! Being lazy in the moment is nice but the “stitch in time” adage is definitely true

[-] mech@feddit.org 12 points 2 months ago

Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.

In many jobs, someone with the power to fire you makes the priorities, allocates your time and does not think long-term.

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[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 37 points 2 months ago

This is a non technical hill but it is applicable to my technical career. The hill is that REMOTE WORK WORKS. I am so frustrated that so many businesses are going back to hybrid or full RTO.

[-] Thermite@lemmings.world 18 points 2 months ago

RTO is about control and management/owners thinking that everyone else is lazy and would not do anything if not constantly pushed. I believe that is because they are the kind of people who would need that kind of supervision.

The financial side is that making people go to work maintains value. The money you spend on lunch, travel, dry cleaning, maintenance of cars, and the increased value of property near places of business add to the ownership class's wealth. All that money you spend traveling to/from and while you are at work goes to them. If you save that money by working from home, the wealth stays with you.

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[-] kescusay@lemmy.world 35 points 2 months ago

React sucks. I'm sorry, I know it's popular, but for the love of glob, can we not use a technology that results in just as much goddamn spaghetti code as its closest ancestor, jQuery? (That last bit is inflammatory. I don't care. React components have no opinionated structure imposed on them, just like jQuery.)

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[-] MudMan@fedia.io 31 points 2 months ago

Is there anybody on Lemmy that isn't a software engineer of some description? No? Anyone?

[-] SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago
[-] buttmasterflex@piefed.social 13 points 2 months ago

I'm a geologist!

[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

Yes, me. I am a network engineer with an expired CCNA

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[-] 0x0@lemmy.zip 30 points 2 months ago

Weird i haven't seen this one yet: the cloud is just someone else's computers.

[-] hamsda@feddit.org 8 points 2 months ago

If you're selfhosting, the cloud is your someone else's computer ;)

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[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 28 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

They should stop teaching the OSI model and stick to the DOD TCP/IP model

In the world of computer networking you are constantly hammered about the OSI model and how computer communication fits into that model. But outside of specific legacy uses, nothing runs the OSI suite, everything runs TCP/IP.

[-] flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 12 points 2 months ago

Understanding that other protocols are possible is important. Sure, reality doesn't fit neatly into the OSI model, but it gives you a conceptual idea of everything that goes into a networking stack.

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[-] KokusnussRitter@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 2 months ago

I fucking hate AI in HR/hiring. I try so hard not to spread my personal data to LLMs/AI ghuls and the moment I apply for a job I need to survive I have to accept that the HR department's AI sorting hat now knows a shit ton about me. I just hope these are closed systems. if anyone from a HR department knows more, please let me know

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[-] Horsey@lemmy.world 24 points 2 months ago

Transparency + blur + drop shadow is peak UI design and should remain so for the foreseeable future. It provides depth, which adds visual context. Elements onscreen should not appear flat; our human predator brains are hardwired and physiologically evolved to parse depth information.

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[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 24 points 2 months ago

the hill i am willing to die on is: FUCK AI. I'll be dead before I let it write a single line of code.

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[-] Fafa@lemmy.world 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Okay, I'm pretty late to the party, but here we go. My field is illustration and art, and especially color theory is something that a lot too often is teached plainly wrong. I think it was in the 1950s when Johannes Itten introduced his book on colortheory. In this book, he states that there are three "Grundfarben" (base colors) that will mix into every color. He explained this model with a color ring that you will still find almost anywhere. This model and the fact that there are three Grundfarben is wrong.

There are different angles from where you can approach color mixing in art, and it always depends on what you want to do. When we speak about colors, we actually mean the experience that we humans have, when light rays fall into our eyes. So, it's actually a perceptual phenomenon, which means it is actually something that has small statistical differences from individual to individual. For example, a greenish blue might be a little bit more green for one person or a little more blue for the other.

Every color, however, has its opposite color. Everybody can test this. Look into a red (not too bright) light for some time and then onto a white wall. The color you will see is the opposite. They will cancel each other out and become white / neutral.

Ittens colormodel, however, is not based in perception. In this model yellow is opposed to violet, which might mix to a neutral color with pigments but not with lightrays. But even that doesn't work a lot of times. I mean, even his book is printed in six colors, even though his three basecolors are supposedly enough to print every color..

In history lot of colormodels have been less correct course. What is so infuriating is that in Ittens case, he just plainly ignored the correct colortheory that already existed (by Albert Henry Munsell) and created his own with whatever rules that he believes are correct.

Even today, this model and rules are teached at art schools and you can see his color circle plastered all over the internet.

Tldr: Johannes Ittens colormodel is wrong, even though it's almost everywhere.

(Added tldr)

[-] Fafa@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Fun fact:

OKLab which was created recently by Björn Ottosson as a hobby project, is a pretty accurate perceptual colorspace. It is open Source and has been adapted by Photoshop for Black and White conversion.

I kinda hope painting apps will also impliment it as a standard model for colopickers.

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[-] EponymousBosh@awful.systems 21 points 2 months ago

Cognitive behavioral therapy/dialectical behavioral therapy are not the universal cure for everything and they need to stop being treated as such

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[-] early_riser@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

A plain text physical password notebook is actually more secure than most people think. It's also boomer-compatible. My folks understand that things like their social security cards need to be kept secure and out of public view. The same can be applied to a physical password notebook. I also think a notebook can be superior to the other ways of generating and storing passwords, at least in some cases.

  1. use the same password for everything: obviously insecure.
  2. Use complex unique passwords for everything: You'll never remember them. If complex passwords are imposed as a technical control, even worse if you have to change them often, you'll just end up with passwords on post-its.
  3. use a password manager: You're putting all your eggs in one basket. If the manager gets breached there goes everything.
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[-] jode@pawb.social 20 points 2 months ago

Any tolerance on a part less than +/- 0.001 isn't real. If I can change the size of the part enough to blow it out of tolerance by putting my hand on it and putting some of my body temperature into it then it's just not real.

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[-] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 months ago

Workplace safety is quickly turning from a factual and risk-based field into a vibes-based field, and that's a bad thing for 95% of real-world risks.

To elaborate a bit: the current trend in safety is "Safety Culture", meaning "Getting Betty to tell Alex that they should actually wear that helmet and not just carry it around". And at that level, that's a great thing. On-the-ground compliance is one of the hardest things to actually implement.

But that training is taking the place of actual, risk-based training. It's all well and good that you feel comfortable talking about safety, but if you don't know what you're talking about, you're not actually making things more safe. This is also a form of training that's completely useless at any level above the worksite. You can't make management-level choices based on feeling comfortable, you need to actually know some stuff.

I've run into numerous issues where people feel safe when they're not, and feel at risk when they're safe. Safety Culture is absolutely important, and feeling safe to talk about your problems is a good thing. But that should come AFTER being actually able to spot problems.

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[-] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 19 points 2 months ago

Dynamic typing sucks.

Type corrosion is fine, structural typing is fine, but the compiler should be able to tell if types are compatible at compile time.

[-] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago

This is one of those things like a trick picture where you can't see it until you do, and then you can't unsee it.

I started with C/C++ so typing was static, and I never thought about it too much. Then when I started with Python I loved the dynamic typing, until it started to cause problems and typing hints weren't a thing back then. Now it's one of my largest annoyances with Python.

A similar one is None type, seems like a great idea, until it's not, Rust solution is much, much better. Similar for error handling, although I feel less strongly about this one.

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IT restrictions should be much more conservatively applied (at least in comparison to what's happening in my neck of the woods). Hear me out.

Of course, if you restrict something in IT, you have a theoretical increase in security. You're reducing the attack surface in some way, shape or form. Usually at the cost of productivity. But also at the cost of the the employees' good will towards the IT department and IT security. Which is an important aspect, since you will never be able to eliminate your attack surface, and employees with good will can be your eyes and ears on the ground.

At my company I've watched restrictions getting tighter and tighter. And yes, it's reduced the attack surface in theory, but holy shit has it ruined my colleagues' attitude towards IT security. "They're constantly finding things to make our job harder." "Honestly, I'm so sick of this shit, let's not bother reporting this, it's not my job anyway." "It will be fine, IT security is taking care of it anyway." "What can go wrong when are computers are so nailed shut?" It didn't used to be this way.

I'm not saying all restrictions are wrong, some definitely do make sense. But many of them have just pissed off my colleagues so much that I worry about their cooperation when shit ends up hitting the fan. "WTF were all these restrictions for that castrated our work then? Fix your shit yourself!"

[-] myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 months ago

You pay me to admin 400 servers on a couple million dollars worth of hardware. Let me install a fucking app on my own machine without 4 levels of bullshit.

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[-] Bruncvik@lemmy.world 17 points 2 months ago

Professionally: Waterfall release cycle kills innovation, and whoever advocates it should be fired on the spot. MVP releases and small, incremental changes and improvements are the way to go.

Personally: Don't use CSS if tables do what you need. Don't use Javascript for static Web pages. Don't overcomplicate things when building Web sites.

[-] victorz@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

Don't use CSS if tables do what you need.

As a web dev, please don't. Use a table if you have data that should be (re)presented. Don't use tables for layout. Please use semantic HTML elements, for the love of accessibility.

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[-] hawgietonight@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

Ebikes are motorbikes, not bycicles.

Not saying they aren't fun or useful at times, but they shouldn't be treated as a bicycles.

I don't care if the motor engages using a button, twist grip, your feet or twitching your nose, it is a motor and exceeds your natural body power.

[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

There are a load of things in IT where using a processor is the wrong choice, and using an FPGA instead would have made a lot of problems a non-issue.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Is that controversial? I've always assumed people avoid FPGAs just because they're unfamiliar with them.

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[-] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 months ago

If you don't understand that development, security, and operations are all one job you will constantly make crap and probably point at some other team to make excuses about it, but it will be actually be your fault.

Programs have to run. They have to be able to change to meet needs. Implementing working security measures is one of those needs.

The amount of times I've had to slap devs hands that wanted to just disable security or remind security that just shutting it down is denial of service is crazy. If it can't deploy or is constantly down or uses stupid amount of resources it's also worthless no matter what it looked like for split second you ran on on the dev machine.

The next patch isn't going to fucking fix it if no one that writes patches knows about the damn issue. Work arounds are hidden technical debt and you have to assume that they will fucking break on some update later. If you are not updating because it breaks your unreported workarounds you will get ignored by the devs at some point, and they are right in doing so.

If you depend on something communicate with the team that works on it. We can send a fucking petabyte of info around the world and to the moon and back before some people write a fucking Ticket, email, or even a IM. Look dumb and asking the stupid question rather than being an actual idiot and leaving something broken for the next decade. We're all dumb, it's why we built computers, get over it and just talk to people. If you really struggle with, don't just communicate, try to over communicate, say an obvious thing now and again just to keep the dialogue open and test that you really on the same page.

That's my rant/hill borne from ulcers supporting crappy IT orgs and having to overcome my own shortcomings to actually say something in channels where things can actually change and not just griping in private about it.

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[-] greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 months ago

Maybe not technical, but teaching is weird.

If people aren't having fun/engaged they're not learning much. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. It's so frustrating to come across someone who writes the standards you're supposed to follow and they are the most boring and fake teacher you've experienced.

[-] untorquer@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago

People are idiots and it's the designers' duty to remove opportunities for an idiot to hurt themselves up and just short of impacting function.

[-] philpo@feddit.org 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Technisation and standardisation are good for the EMS sector.

The whole "it was better when we could do what we want and back then we had only real calls with sicker people and everything was good" is fucking aweful and hurting the profession.

Look, you fucking volunteer dick, I know you do this for 10 years longer than me (and I do it for 25 now),but unlike you I did it full-time and probably had more shifte in one year than you had in your life. Now my back is fucked because back then there was no "electrohydraulic stretcher", no stair chair, the ventilator was twice as heavy (and could basically nothing), the defibrillator weighted so much we often had to switch carrying it after two floors up.

And we had just as many shit calls,but got actually attacked worse because the shit 2kg radios were shit and had next to zero coverage indoors, and so had cellphones which led to you being unable to even call for backup.

And of course we had longer shifts,needed to work more hours and the whole job market was even more fucked.

"But we didn't need this and that,we looked at the patient". Yeah,go fuck yourself. MUCH more people died or took damage from that. So many things were not seen. And it was all accepted as "yeah, that's how life is".

So fuck everyone in this field and their nostalgia.

[-] chunes@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

If people used a language that actually leverages the strengths of dynamic typing, they wouldn't dislike it so much.

I encourage every programmer to build a Smalltalk program from the ground up while it's running the entire time. It really is a joy

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[-] bobo1900@startrek.website 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Electric vehicles are not a solution for environmental problems, not now at least, they pollute when building the batteries and, unless nuclear energy is widespread, they will be powered by coal/gas making them pretty polluting. They will be a solution only when we have cleaner energy available.

Bonus: people should stop being lazy and learn to setup a server infrastructure instead of using "the cloud". Your data are safer, you save money and give less power to gargantuan cloud companies.

[-] Maestro@fedia.io 18 points 2 months ago

Weren't there multiple researches concluding that even an EV powered by a coal plant is better for the environment than an ICE vehicle?

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[-] Diva@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 months ago

if you're using modern fabrication techniques, a couple 10uf mlcc capacitors in small packages are just as good as traditional decade capacitors (10uf,1uf,0.1uf) for decoupling in pretty much every situation, and you need to worry about less varieties on your bill of materials

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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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