Oh I’m sure, it’s mostly fine, my biggest annoyance is actually that the OSD buttons take just a bit too much force (especially for how small they are) so you pretty much always lift the corner, which results in the display “bouncing” for a few seconds before it settles.
And that sometimes it’ll get confused and won’t switch the USB peripherals correctly, but that’s not too common (hasn’t happened in a long while in fact, maybe there was a firmware update I didn’t notice which fixed it).
This is probably an extreme example, but it is no secret that the majority of people employed in an organization actually does barely anything of value. Price's law comes to mind.
I’d argue that’s a separate and more deeply rooted issue.
At some level of abstraction, most of the currently prosperous IT companies could be seen as barely producing anything of value, and our startup culture kinda goes in the same way (purely looking at the rate of success vs failures gives a grim picture regarding the amount of time dedicated to these failures).
We have many justifications for that, but at no point I’d see our field as being hyperfocused on only solely bringing actual value to the world.
PS: that’s not just our field of course, ad business comes right to my mind, but we probably have many other work field with very little ‘value’ when looked from a high enough perspective.
The way I see it, the current ridiculously high salaries of SWE, the easiness of it, how little so many seem to do valuable work, is in a big part due to inefficiencies in the system, due to novelty of SWE and how invisible it is.
In my field, mechanical engineering, we've had centuries of machine making. Margins are usually razor thin.
In software that's not the case. Subscriptions that should cost the customer cents per month or year, are costing 10-100x that. Margins are ridiculously high. But it's all so new and not intuitive, like a physical part, we just pay whatever.
Then the invisibility of code and difficulty of distinguishing from the outside what is well made and what isn't, enables.
In all my years working as MechE I've never seen anyone just slacking off. We're all always being pushed, working. I look some of the stories of SWE and it's ridiculous.
I think many SWE just rationalize their high salary as bringing more value to the world, which imo is not really true.
Oh all the things I wish they would use their marketing budget on. For instance they still can't correctly compute different VAT classes in their merchant reports.
To expand on this: if you're designing / building / assembling a computer or cluster, and components are 6" apart, then the minimum latency for communicating between those components is 1 nanosecond.
Given clock speeds of multiple GHz, that means spending an entire clock cycle or more simply communicating between components.
(A Sendmail misconfiguration resulted in a maximum response time of 3 milliseconds, or roughly 500 miles of travel at the speed of light. The observed behaviour was that a uni campus computer could send email only within a 500 mile radius, as noted by the statistics department.)
> Given clock speeds of multiple GHz, that means spending an entire clock cycle or more simply communicating between components.
Yeah that's expected isn't it? That's why we have caches on die. Nobody is out there expecting main memory reads to retire in a clock cycle, let alone IO! I don't think even lower tier cache access retires in a single clock cycles. That's just not how processors work these days.
It's clusters. It's datacentres. It's tools which span the globe. Or extend into space.
The Web by default is now transacted over HTTPS. This means that every session requires a TLS handshake:
- Client hello
- Server hello + key
- Client key exchange.
- Server finished.
- Client finished.
- Data transfer begins.
That's six exchanges, and three round trips. For an antipodal set of hosts, at 300ms per trip, that's nearly 2 seconds just to set up a session. If you're communicating with a Moon base, it's eight seconds.
And if you're using a tool or protocol which presumes cheap or fast round-trips, and uses a lot of round trips, you may find it's unusable.
Some years back a multi-campus site rolled out a remote-console tool that worked across platforms in datacentres --- we had both Linux and Windows hosts.
Working locally with the DC one building over in the campus, or even with a facility elsewhere in the province, performance was laggier than local, but tolerable. The team operating out of Dubai was waiting five minutes to see login screens presented.
Which gets back to my, and Hopper's, initial point:
Space adds time.
If you're doing something, anything, which involves communicating between two or more components frequently, then the further apart those components are, the longer it will take.
(It's also more likely to be affected by other issues --- latency, unreliability, interference, injection, exfiltration, ...)
And that will grow linearly with distance as a multiple of interactions.
There's a lot of code and processing which presumes delays are small and components are near. As those assumptions are violated, performance tends to degrade spectacularly.
Or undermining other similar businesses that actually have to make more money than they spend. After said businesses are gone, and the investor cash dries up, what benefit is actually left?
How does that work with other kinds of investments like loans? You don't "save up" to open a restaurant, you put together a business plan and go to a bank. VCs are just doing that but willing to take on riskier businesses in exchange for equity instead of interest payments.
I suspect you'll find few restaurants opening up with the intention of opening as many locations as possible as quickly as they can be built, all providing food at under cost for years on end until the local restaurant scene is sufficiently disrupted that McDonalds buys them to make them go away.
I mean you're essentially describing DoorDash + competitors and HelloFresh + competitors. But in the restaurant industry proper it's the same thing except your exit isn't to get bought by McDonalds but to secretly dominate the mid-high tier dining scene in a given area and collect all the profits. So they won't build a bunch of the same restaurants but will take on massive debt to buy everything in a trendy area. I didn't really expect that in 2018ish that there would be a pivot from these companies to a real-estate play so they don't even have to own the restaurants anymore but can force them to use the company payment system and suppliers but it makes total sense in a boring dystopia way.
"Support Local Restaurants! (being puppeted by a massive hybrid restaurant/real-estate conglomerate)"
Well the infrastructure certainly needs to be built, but the solution is straight forward. You just place slow charging stations where the cars are parked overnight.
You're already doing light exercises which was part of the solution for me.
The next step is a bad one - you actually have to turn the television off, it won't do it for you.
I think also you may be a bit overwhelmed by all the things you feel you should be doing, to the point you don't want to do any of them. So try to forget about them for a while.
Take walks in your neighborhood. Try to notice something that has changed, or is still the same.
In a few weeks maybe the mood will strike to have a cup of tea, and do some reading. Maybe not, maybe next week you'll learn something new.
i learned to control my TV habits by planning what i want to watch in advance. when the new TV guide came out i would mark every show that i wanted to watch, and then i followed that schedule and turned the TV on only for those shows and nothing else.
now that i can choose when to watch things, i pick the shows i follow, and when i have time for tv i just take an episode of these shows, ignoring everything else.
