I leave my adblocker off for YouTube because I want the small channels I watch to get money.

I'm so glad that political season is finally over because I've been being spammed by politicians over and over and over. The worst part was they weren't even from my state.

Advertisers forgot that you shouldn't spam the exact same ad over and over. I am never going to buy insurance from gigco, state form, or liderty for that reason.

Sometimes there is a glitch and I get more generic ads, and I live on the edge of a "rich" zip code so I get ads for jet rideshares and lately ULA, I mean I enjoy Scott Manley's Deep Space Updates but I am not launching sats, so I am not sure why I get those ads.

When you eventually need insurance who will you buy it from? One of those companies that you know are insurance companies has a better chance of getting it than some little unknown company. Nobody is immune to propaganda.

Something I have been doing is saving PDFs of interesting articles. I actually go back for some of them. Organization is always an issue but mostly desktop search finds it.

Fun fact: there are over 600 definitions of the word "run" and over 400 for "set". But yeah, English is really precise enough for programming.

How many times have we seen that there's been a spec for something and the programmers write something that is exactly like the spec said but was completely wrong?

I found that sea, space and automotive are the three most hostile environments, each with very different requirements that made it hard in different ways.

Seems reasonable. I'd like to hear your thinking on the automotive side. Is it the cost pressure at scale and durability requirements?

The story of Lindybeige who is just trying to do anything online after an attempt to change providers left him without a mobile phone that would allow him to authenticate.

In summary, our phones are now our biggest single point of failure.

Just wait for real life hacking to be a thing. With someone's phone these days, if the person is sedated and handcuffed they can't report they've lost access to the phone - a criminal gang could sit there for 24 hours or more with any number of ways to drain off a few thousand from that persons bank account, convert credit into bitcoins ... whatever else ... sadly security has been pushed to passkeys, smart phones and other devices that a person inclined to adopt such things are left wide open. Presently such a thing seems inconceivable, but right tools and the right plan ... and I've left some important things out, no need to give idiots ideas, and soon ... we'll gladly submit to constant A.I. surveillance to monitor where we are at all times.

https://xkcd.com/538/

I've read some very bad READMEs. I mean really bad, like not even tell me what the program is for bad. I remember one that forgot to tell me what its own name was.

But really this is basic usability testing. I still run into issue at work where its like "Oh, you need to install C# runtime" or some other thing so it can even start. We have since fixed the build chain to check for that.

I know its hard to step out of your own context but that is what documentation is.

There are over 600 definitions of the work "run" and over 400 for the word "set" and you really expect that some end user in another industry cares what your context is. It's our job to care about their context because they are paying us to solve their problem.

I can't find it at the moment, but I saw a study where they fed snakes different forms of beef. Raw chunk, raw chopped, raw ground, and cooked versions of the same. And they found the smaller the bits the more calories were available to the snake.

Structuring Life to Support Creativity By Sandra Tayler Only a short way into this but it is a really interesting toolbox for finding ways to figure out what's important to you and making space for creativity.

Master Alvin by Orson Scott Card Kinda impressed that he finished the series after 30 years. GRR Martin loses another excuse.

Curious what you have learned so far about creativity, practical "do it now" type ideas.

I read Artists Way a few years back, and did some of the recommended practices (daily pages, and artist dates) - it was effective in subtle and powerful ways.

I’m only at chapter 4 but so far it’s asking What do you want to do? What are you actually doing? What can you change to start making those things line up better?

Had a cousin that was trying to use vape to get off of cigarettes, but it wasn't going well. The new plan was to move to the South grow tobacco.

no kidding . ppl have been trying to look for cig alternatives forever. If vaping worked as well, it would be everywhere. It's still a small niche.

A significant factor in vapes not overtaking cigarettes is the tobacco lobby; they pay to play in legislature to ban vapes and associated paraphernalia in many US states, as well as create their own vape products to play both sides of the market. It's difficult to use vapes to quit smoking cigarettes when vape juice and single use vapes get banned, yet cigarettes remain legal.

I'm old enough to remember the Desktop Publishing revolution in the early 90s. There were so many awful posters, flyers and such that actual people made. My favorite was a preschool flyer where they used the kidnapper font.