I see a lot of people saying "We never lose power, what are you talking about?"

I've lived in several places in New England, some more rural than others. Some places you lose power often, other you don't. Even within the same town. Even if you are not in a rural area. It just so happened where I lived previously, we rarely lost power while friend across town lost it all the time. Many times I loaned them my generator.

I now live in a much more rural place. We lose power more now. Not often, but it happens. Trees fall, cars skid into poles, shit happens. It's good to be prepared. Ver bad things happen to your pipes without heat.

Two major factors I see a impediment to this: 1. Most management doesn't understand it and therefore won't champion it. 2. Those few that do understand it will resist it because it reduces the need for management and process.

This is similar to the Bible being in a dead language only understood by priests.

But how amazing would it be if everything from company policy to product specifications was in a format that could be programmatically accessed and tracked? When/if you needed a document you would access it from an artifactory where it had been generated and versioned automatically?

It may very well be that LLMs will push this idea to the forefront. PDFs and Word Docs suck for AI interaction. As we incorporate LLMs into our businesses it might be a natural progression to move toward databases, LaTex, code and source control for documentation and policy.

The New Testament is actually in Greek, if you go to any church in Greece they are reading from it in the original language and people understand it fine.

Modern Greek speakers can NOT understand ancient Greek. And modern Hebrew is NOT mutually intelligible with Aramaic. The OP is correct and the two responses are nonsense. Also, in the 1500s when the Bible was translated to English, very few Europeans spoke Latin and if they did it was a very different Latin from the translations from the Roman era (pre 500 or so). Languages change over time and the Latin spoken by the aristocrats in the 1500s was very very different from the Latin spoken by the Romans.

I simply made the observation that when you go to churches in Greece, they are speaking the original New Testament and people can understand it. Which part are you refuting, that the priest is reading the original text or that the parishioners can understand him?

It certainly sounds strange and unlike how any modern Greek person would speak, but it can be basically understood especially if you are a bit used to it. I’m not an expert but I think it’s probably a smaller gap than say Latin and modern Italian. Definitely a smaller gap than English and Old English, despite being more than twice as old!

Virtually none of the Bible was written in a currently-dead language. Only small bits were written in Aramaic, and Koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew are pretty much comprehensible to modern Greek and Hebrew speakers.

Even the Christian era of the Bible being distributed in Latin made perfect sense since it was originally mostly being distributed to people who spoke Latin with questionable accents (and where Latin was the language everyone who was literate was literate in).

"As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes."

Except those with ears and/or eyes.

I find it VERY likely they had a junk policy. This is one of the most important things the ACA did, it defined what could be considered health insurance. Before the ACA, a company could sell you a policy that essentially covered nothing. Usually those junk policies had cleverly worded agreements that hid the fact that nothing was covered (pre-existing conditions, restrictive networks, carve-outs for expensive treatments, etc).

Since the majority of people don't run into those issues, they are blissfully unaware that if/when they have a major medical event they are under-insured.

Once a virologist always a virologist I always say.

If I understand the graph correctly, it looks like there's maybe a three percentage point increase. But given there is a 1 percentage point delta in the pre-ban data, that would seem to indicate there is at least a 1 point variation that must be ignored as irrelevant.

I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points.

My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later.

Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation.

Too many unknowns and not enough signal.

I agree with you. In the industry today I feel there there are software engineers and there are programmers. The engineers design, architect, and invent. The programmers do the rote work. Of course it's not black and white, but that's at the extremes of the spectrum.

I'm hoping that AI programming pushes more people toward the engineering side and as it takes over the rote work side. There will be people far to the programmer side that might be put out of a job, but the creative, innovative, inventive engineering positions will persist.

It does push people and not gently.

But it does open up engineering to do much more on otherwise under engineered areas and open up entire new fields.

I always tell clients (or users): "If you bring your car to the mechanic because it's making a noise and tell them to replace the belt, they will replace the belt and you car will still make the noise. Ask them to fix the noise."

In other words, if you need expert help, trust the expert. Ask for what you need, not how to do it.

If you tell the mechanic "my car is making a noise, fix the belt please" and then they just fix the belt, that's on the mechanic as well.

I would hope the mechanic would engage with the customer in more back and forth.

But sometimes power structures don't allow for it. I worked tech support in a number of companies. At some companies we were empowered to investigate and solve problems... sometimes that took work, and work from the customer. It had much better outcomes for the customer, but fixes were not quick. Customers / companies with good technical staff in management understood that dynamic.

Other companies were "just fix it" and tech support were just annoying drones and the company and customer's and management treated tech support as annoying drones. They got a lot more "you got exactly what you asked for" treatment ... because management and even customers will take the self defeating quick and easy path sometimes.

It's a hypothetical to communicate an entirely different point. The mechanic is't real or important.

I am a qualified mechanic. I no longer work in the field but I did for many years. Typically, when people 'trust their instincts as a user' they are fantastically wrong. Off by a mile. They have little to no idea how a car works besides youtube videos and forum posts which are full of inaccuracies or outright nonsense and they don't want to pay for diagnosis.

So when they would come in asking for a specific part to be replaced with no context I used to tell them that we wouldn't do that until we did a diagnosis. This is because if we did do as they asked and, like in most cases, it turned out that they were wrong they would then become indignant and ask why we didn't do diagnosis for free to tell them that they were wrong.

Diagnosis takes time and, therefore, costs money. If the user was capable of it then they would also be capable enough to carry out the repair. If they're capable of carrying out the diagnosis and the repair then they wouldn't be coming to me. This has proved to be true over many years for everyone from kids with their first car to accountants and even electrical engineers working on complex systems for large corporations as their occupation. That last one is particularly surprising considering that an engineer should know the bounds of their knowledge and understand how maintenance, diagnosis and repair work on a conceptual level.

Don't trust your instincts in areas where you have no understanding. Either learn and gain the understanding or accept that paying an expert is part of owning something that requires maintenance and repair.

If you don't trust the expert then why are you asking them to fix your stuff? It's a weird idea that you'd want an idiot to do what you say because you know better.

In this case, it's at least partly because the expert has access to a lift...

If they're asking the mechanic to do X and they understand the mechanic is just doing X and NOT venturing to fix your problem. I guess that is fine.

I agree though it sets up a weird dynamic where folks might come back to the expert and complain a problem isn't fixed, but that's not what they asked for / they broke the typical expert and customer dynamic.

In my experience the best thing is to then convince the expert you are right, using your own expertise.

If your mechanic is too stupid to recognize the problem after you explain it then you don't have a mechanic, the set of hands you are directing is basically unskilled labor.

How do you know you're right if you haven't fixed it?

That seems like a way to just be a stuck in the mud and wrong the whole time.

exclude the impossible and what is left however improbable must be the truth

If we're still talking about an amateur doing it, isn't their understanding of the possibilities petty limited?

Google is moving toward Apple's model: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-developer-verificat...

Turns out authoritarianism is bad for freedom. Who knew?