Dude interviewed some people that did both software and other forms of engineering. Vast majority said software engineering is real engineering.

These are a few things that stood out to me.

In software engineering the gap between tradecraft and engineering is a lot smaller than the other engineering fields like electricians and electrical engineers.

Software engineering can iterate faster because it's cheap. If civil engineers could iterate like software engineers they would. New modeling tools are allowing this.

A lot of physical engineering defects are being fixed with software. 737 Max was given as an example where the new engine configuration made the plane unstable and it was fixed in software.

A lot of things can be learned from the different fields. All the other engineering fields wish they had version control. Software engineering needs more very focused deep dive books like this the other engineering fields have. Ex: https://www.amazon.com/...

I heard this on the radio yesterday. Secretly ruthless is a good way to describe Google.

SHAPIRO: OK. So big picture on this anniversary, 25 years in, if you could describe Google's legacy in a sentence, what would that be?

PATEL: Secretly ruthless.

SHAPIRO: Oh, that's rough. Wow. Secretly ruthless - that's even less than a sentence. Give me a little bit more. Why do you say secretly ruthless?

PATEL: Google has convinced everyone that it is this incredibly sincere and earnest company - that it's just a bunch of goofballs making cool things. That is true. But I think if we just paid a little more attention to where Google's money comes from - and it is almost entirely advertising - I think we would be able to see the company and its influence a little bit more clearly. But the truth is, it is an utterly ruthless advertising company that is very, very, very successful at delivering results to its clients.

SHAPIRO: But Nilay, you didn't mention how cute the Google doodles are.

PATEL: Yeah, the - I understand. They're very cute.

https://www.npr.org/...

People forget that user experience isn't just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.

Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn't have happened. Their users wouldn't get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That's not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.

SDF being a 501c(7) is one of the reasons that it's my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn't. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it's really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.

Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn't be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user's attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.

The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you're already involved in. Another reason I'm on SDF is retro computing. If you're really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you're involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.

Also, I'm old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone's parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.

P.S.

Check out how theATL.social is organized. The guy did as a LLC, but he seems to be community focused and transparent.

https://yall.theatl.social/post/201135

https://opencollective.com/theatlsocial

https://yall.theatl.social/communities

If your body goes unclaimed then it's up to whatever local entity to dispose of it. Most places cremate.

If you want to watch a dark documentary about how dead people without a next of kin are handled. => https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342180/

I’m in that weird group that’s between Gen-X and Millennial. I’ve seen us called Xennials or the Oregon Trail Generation.

A lot of programmers need to work on their soft skills.

Diverse teams are more effective and deliver better results. A group of people with different backgrounds and experiences will come up with different solutions to a problem than a heterogeneous group. This is a well researched topic. It is why corporate America and the military are pushing for more DE&I.

I wonder if they licensed the source of 5.0+ to someone and are still getting paid for it. If so, it's probably something ubiquitous and critical that nobody would think of like traffic lights or water treatment plants.

What industry do you work in? I would focus on that. The truth is that programing is somewhat of a commodity, and a lot of your value is going to come from industry knowledge.

I mostly use VS Code as a simple text editor with some of the CSV plugins. Though with JetBrains coming out with Fleet I've started to use that more. It doesn't have plugin support yet so it's not getting a lot of use.

For everything else I use whatever JetBrains IDE fits. For work, it's mostly IntelliJ, DataGrip, PyCharm, and DataSpell. At home, it's IntelliJ DataGrip and CLion. I guess I've kinda drank the JetBrains KookAid, but to me, it's worth the subscription to the all products pack. Especially if you are a polyglot since you keep a consistent IDE experience.

Google is an advertising company. Something like 80% of their revenue comes from selling ads.

How would spending money on Gitlab support their primary business.

I would have like to been in the meeting where they discussed putting the keyboard cable on the front of the keyboard.

About twice a week we would go to the computer lab filled with Apple IIes. Usually we had to play Number Munchers, Word Munchers, or some other game to reenforce whatever we learned in class. After we finished the game in the lesson plan, we could then play whatever educational game we wanted. Oregon Trail was a popular choice because nothing was funnier than having the game say a classmate had died or broke a leg. And the hunting and rafting mini games were the closest to arcade games.

Also keep in mind that the only exposure most of the teachers had to a computer were the mainframe terminals in the school's office or the computer lab. MECC put together a lot of software and training for teachers. A school building out an Apple II based computer lab with a bunch of MECC software was as close to turnkey as they could get at the time. The documentation for Oregon Trail or Odell Lake gives you an idea of what it was like.

http://www.mecc.co/...

http://www.mecc.co/...

Don't worry about Linux, and don't try to over complicate things. If you are set on going the Linux route, get a Raspberry Pi. It will give him something really flexible and cheap to experiment with later on.

Look into modded Minecraft. There is a mod called Computer Craft where you can write programs in Lua. One of the things that makes scratch so good for kids is that the results are instantly visible. This is important for kids.

https://www.curseforge.com/...

There are programs to control your reactor > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9fC3khXuj8

Unmodded Minecraft has Redstone where you can build logic gates.

Outside of what you already have check into a maker space or a computer club at school. Here in Atlanta there is https://www.codeninjas.com. Maybe there is something similar in your area.

The way we do it on my team is debate and discussion. Debate can be tricky in a professional environment. Some people go into thinking they need to dominate their opponent and make it personal. Personally, I would try to avoid hiring people like that in the first place, but sometimes you got to make do. The thing to remember is that you all are on the same side and have the same goal.

Do you mean this?

https://www.columbia.edu/...

I think we worry about population too much. The way you stop excessive population growth is to eliminate poverty and improve child mortality.

RIP Hans Rosling - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxxx03_JHlM

We are at peak child. This is a few years old and there are still around 2 billion children in the world. https://www.youtube.com/... It's worth watching the entire video.

Do more than post links to various articles and blogs. If you are going to post an article tell us why you thought it was important enough to share with the community.

Maybe they are chunks of some kind of ceramic like material.