I had a very similar washer I think, from the 90s, and it eventually started exhibiting the exact same symptom (sometime in 2020 during the COVID crisis). I followed the same process and the blog author, but when I opened the transmission, the problem was immediately apparent: the large "spin gear" was plastic and was completely worn down, the teeth did not engage at all anymore with its driving gear.
Unfortunately, I found Maytag did not sell any separate parts for the transmission, only the whole transmission, for somewhere around 300$, which was more than the 25-ish years old washer was worth to me. People frequently bash manufacturers for using plastic parts like, as a mechanical engineer, I think there may be valid reasons for the design choice, but knowing the part is subject to wear, it should absolutely be made available as a spare.
I ended buying a new washer, from a very limited selection of models that were available in the summer of 2020 shortage of just about everything. I gave away the old one for free, the guy who picked it up needed the motor to repair another machine, I hope he was able to use the parts to keep it running for a long time.
Didn’t know it was required, but it makes sense, as it is indeed quite cold. Good thing I always have winter tires on in the winter anyway, so I’m not breaking the law when I drive to Montreal!
I get the feeling that labview was very big in the 00s but has been losing a lot of steam in the last 10 years or so, maybe because of failure to modernize. Labview today feels and looks like a 90s app, contrary to eg. modern Simulink.
FWIW I work in Simulink quite a bit, and "code blocks" (matlab function / matlab system) tend be used quite liberally in my models. Having the visual presentation of data flow is quite nice though for the kinds of things Simulink is used for, mostly physical modeling of electrical or mechanical systems.
They had stopped for a while because they were transitioning away from using Paypal as a processor. A few weeks, maybe a month or so tops? I had to switch to JLC PCB for an order back in January, because they didn't support any viable payment method for me in Canada (tried to make a payoneer account, they don't do business in Canada).
But I just checked and it seems that they now accept CCs again.
In case anyone is interested, I enjoyed the book "Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet, about management lessons applied by the author who was a US Navy submarine captain. It does very much emphasize giving trust, responsibility and accountability to workers (or enlisted personnel, in this case).
One of my favourite techniques from that book is to remove the centralised backlog. People's ideas for improvement shouldn't be everyone's administrative burden. There are too many ideas for that.
Instead, keep a central record of the things that need to be done right now, and if something is important to do later, then someone will probably keep track of it personally and bring it up later when it is more relevant.
Agreed. Tex/Latex is very old tech. Error recovery and messages is very bad. Developing new macros in Tex is about as fun as you expect developing in a 70s-era language to be (ie probably similar to cobol and old fortran).
I haven't tried it yet but Typst seems like a promising replacement: https://typst.app/
uv has mostly solved the python issue. IME it's dependency resolution is fast and just works. Packages are hard linked from a global cache, which also greatly reduces storage requirements when you work with multiple projects.
uv is great for resolution, but it seems like it doesn't really address the build complexity for heavy native dependencies. If you are doing any serious work with torch or local LLMs, you still run into issues where wheels aren't available for your specific cuda/arch combination. That is usually where I lose time, not waiting for the resolver.
I looked at SOML and I like both tbh. I just wish we could pick either one and be done with json/yaml/toml for human-edited configuration.
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