Remember old phones with buttons? I bet everyone over 30 could have texted a someone with their phone under the table or in their pocket. I’m sure there’s some people who could do that with a touchscreen, but not everyone
I patented a phone user interface that used a rocker switch for dot and dash. You could morse code under the table or in your pocket with nobody noticing! It doesn't take long to use morse and it can be very fast and accurate.
With haptic feedback you could even receive morse with nobody the wiser.
Just kidding. Yea, unfortunately I think a lot of people are suffering in the age of overtooling. Need a notes app, department X is using OneNote except for Mike, who is using Notely. Department Y uses obscure Markdown notes app with great PKM linkage, but no one outside of their group understands it (tbh, neither do they)...
Notes are just the example that I landed on. I'm sure the bigger tech companies have experienced this for awhile, but it slowly disseminates to other industries as well.
Maybe I'm just using HN as therapy, but things seem to have gotten over-complicated and under-defined. A seemingly endless churn of new tools.
Trying to work with my team (management team) on standardizing SharePoint setup, file structures, notes, etc. but it is really hard to get everyone on the same page.
It's nice to see such a nice functional/detailed design around an organizational tool.
A friend and I applied to YC in sept 2021 seeking funding to build tooling in this space. Lots of tools exist to help generate content. Lots of tools exist to help search some or all of it. No one is really building anything to enrich and expose the data with on ramps for folks. I don't know that our idea is/was any better but I feel the pain and I know lots of others do as well.
As for this Artsy stuff... their give-a-damn is through the roof. A+
Unfortunately I think the solution is very much the users and content, not the tools. What I mean by that is you need to have documentation on processes and workflow. That needs to be drilled into peoples heads and routinely audited.
As empowering as software is it really can allow for chaos when it comes to knowledge base. I don’t think there’s going to be any amount of integration with any one tooling that would make a solution click with all users. It always comes back to who the individuals are and how they perceive productivity.
They may be right as an individual. Tool X may be way better for them. A lot of us are working on teams though and with that we have to learn to adapt to what works for the team.
Back when I worked in a software company, everything had to be in a single database. Top down control by a CEO with an engineering bent seems to be the only way the chaos gets tamed.
Unfortunately my company is relatively diverse and we have different departments that do vastly different things. I would settle for an unambiguous narrative from our director though, who manages all the silos in out department.
I think that’s what me and my team of managers are on to (hopefully)
I’ve been with the same company over the past 12 years.
My group started real small and we had a great rapport. This was 95% in office (sometimes we were at customers or something for days/weeks here and there). We would go out for drinks at least once a week. We had debates and discussions, pranks and other nonsense. It was generally a fun time.
Then there was some attrition and I moved to another group and back again years later. The group was a little bigger, but it never came back to the way it was.
Flash forward another few years to Covid. Everyone goes full remote. Eventually my company adopts a 2 day policy (everyone’s in 2 days a week). At this point my department is expanding rapidly. People aren’t always in the same days and some people rarely come in at all (policies are loosely enforced). We also added some roles that were largely out of office (staff aug), so you would never see those people.
It got to the point where I would look at my company and think to myself “who are all these people?”
I started asking people out for drinks after works and, since I moved up, asked my director if I could organize some company sponsored outings.
Eventually I settled back in. Doing things with your coworkers outside of work helps to make it feel more whole. Companies, just like relationships, are not unchanging and you can experience the same sort of feelings even when you don’t move to another company.
Give it time. Try to socialize not over work, but doing something else.
I work as a “contractor” and when I sit down to work with some sysadmin they watch me and ask out I bring up the old style config windows. One of them had started a sheet while watching me with all the run commands and helper phrases (North Carolina PennsylvAnia).
Run commands are great for me, but it sucks when I have to walk someone through something over the phone. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t walk people through the gui methods anymore and it’s actually easier to explain how to open a run prompt and type xyz
I have been doing this my entire career. IMO its always been much easier to tell someone to hold the Win key and press R and enter a short command than it is to guide them through the UI to whatever setting needs interacting with, especially over the phone.
All Linux users have known that forever... Also you can email a command to copy and paste into a terminal, try emailing a procedure like "open app X, click button Y, type Z in field W..."
Some of the people I work with don’t understand cmd/posh syntax. Additionally they are often working with air gapped systems, so copy paste is not really an option. Those 2 things make it really difficult to have someone do something by cli only, especially if it’s relatively complex command (pipes, regex, vars)
If you ever end up talking to Microsoft tier 2 support they'll do almost everything through PowerShell.
Which I think hints at the problem. Internally, Microsoft must not be dogfooding (or is it dogfeeding?) their GUI. It's an over-correction from the time when Windows was criticized for being too reliant on visual tools for administration and devs asked for better automation. Well, now scripting is the preferred way to interact with the OS and the GUI plays second fiddle.
There’s actually new functionality that has been specifically designed with no GUI on purpose. Do a google of split brain DNS. The only way to set it up is by creating additional DNS zones and creating DNS query filters. Can only be done in posh. There are other examples of that too, but I’ve had to implement split brain before so I know that one for a fact.
That new context menu is garbage (for me). I use advanced functions regularly to the point that after a day of being on 11 it bothered me enough to figure out how to revert to showing the “advanced” (old) context menu.
Going forward, when I hear the critique that Linux "has too many things to customize," I am going to point people at these comments. I am so glad that I got off this rollercoaster.
I had it worse, Mac at work was an unwavering reality (Intune has since come to Ubuntu LTS which, while utter shite, is still better than MacOS). Apart from taking all direction from the marketing department, at least Windows is functionally competent. It could be worse - trust me.
Yea, there are many things in windows that you adjust (hack) in the registry, but there are many things that you cannot. There’s also no guarantee that when you make a mod like this that it will last forever. You’re at the whim of MS and any single update could be a reckoning.
I find the (mobile) site difficult to follow. It took me awhile to realize that the “Become an Expert in Linux” was actually a clickable link and not just a slogan banner. That link brings you to an explanation of the phased learning approach. I would argue that nothing on the homepage informs the end user of what ArcoLinux is.
What’s the difference between just doing a core Arch install and going through the wiki to learn how to install all the components that you need? Maybe there’s more to this, but on its face that’s all I could glean. I think I learned more about Linux on the arch wiki and forums than anywhere else.
I was troubleshooting a very irregular network interruption between two industrial controllers (AB PLC and a DCS). For those who do not work in industrial automation communication between assets is essential and some disruptions can be quite costly depending on the industry/product being made. That can be true of even relatively minimal disruptions.
I loaded up an RPi with arch, popped a thumb drive on there and created some startup scripts. Once the RPi booted up it just performed a rolling packet monitor. Once I was alerted about a disruption I went and grabbed the thumb drive. I found a Modbus TCP driver bug.
What’s even better is I ended up ‘packaging’ it in an enclosure and was able to utilize it in a lot of scenarios. I’ve been using it over the past 2 years.
Edit: in the industrial world equipment like this is not in racks/server rooms. They are usually located in panels that have no external networking (security). When I ‘grabbed’ that means traveling to the site and literally taking the drive.
> Edit: in the industrial world equipment like this is not in racks/server rooms.
A rack by any other name . . . :-)
TBH I was thinking of not just the trad. IT server room racks but also of cramped radio comms "cupboards" by towers and of production circuit | industrial control access panels / locations in both indoor "warehouse" production and outdoor mineral processing circuits ..
Always handy to have a small known general purpose computer with ports, scripts, utilities, etc when you're tracking down the weird bug of the day.
I’ve been meaning to get a flipper zero, but I would love to see that device with a standard gig Ethernet port. The flexibility would be amazing. PoE for bonus points.
However, for ultimate utility I think the next iteration of my packet scraper will be a dual NIC’d SBC so I don’t have to worry about hubs or ‘managed’ switches with port mirroring.
NanoPi R4S is nice and might be of interest to you. The RK3399/OP1 chipset seems well supported by mainline. Only potential drawback is the second GbE LAN is connected using USB3.0 internally on the mainboard. IIRC the XHCI protocol fixes the EHCI (USB2.0) CPU usage polling problem, and the interface can indeed reach close to line speed.
I’m building a new department to scale out services that I solely did under another department. Coming from a small company in a specialized field this means that my attention is split between managing the few under me, still actually doing the work and other admin BS. As a former doer and control freak the hardest thing has been getting out of my peoples’ ways and untangling myself from the work.
A close second is, as previously pointed out, eliminating as much additional business BS as possible. Our current director likes to really have communal discussions on business direction and development, which I’m not opposed to, but the number of meetings is too much. I’ve been clawing back my time ever since the transition.
Agreed, got my degree in BME and it was probably evenly split between Bio, EE and Mech E. Went on to work in industrial automation, which a lot of people look at me with a questionable stare, but actually makes perfect sense.
I remember going to a career fair senior year right after doing a physio lab where we directly studied feedback systems. The company I ended up working for was demoing their software, which was control graphics. Looked a lot like the diagrams we were using in labs.
In my…not too old, but not young years I am finding that I will quite often forget my phone at home. I find this to be of almost no consequence. I still carry a “wallet”, which is really just a stack of few cards. I live in a city, so if I really needed some info or had to make an emergency call I would just ask a neighbor (most people in my neighborhood are super nice). Most importantly, when I stop for a drink at a bar or I am at the playground with the kids I am forced, and this is a good thing, to not be checking social media/news aggregators/email.
I don’t think I could do without it during business hours because of the nature of my work, but it’s certainly fine for me to go without off hours.
Side note, I recently had a bunch of cash on hand for some reason. It is super convenient to grab a beer and just throw down a bill instead of waiting for a check. Digital pay services are great when splitting a check and are nsuper helpful when you are out of cash, but remember that cash, almost always*, works.
