Look up Roman concrete. There are 2000 year old bridges and aqueducts still in use.

We only recently figured out how to reproduce Roman concrete.

We’d have more but a lot were blown up during WWII.

There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better

The difference is that they didn't have rebar. And so they built gravity stable structures. Heavy and costly as fuck.

A modern steel and concrete structure is much lighter and much cheaper to produce.

It does mean a nodern structure doesn't last as long but also the roman stuff we see is what survived the test of time, not what crumbled.

> There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better

Roman concrete is special because it is much more self-healing than modern concrete, and thus more durable.

However, that comes at the cost of being much less strong, set much slower and require rare ingredients. Roman concrete also doesn’t play nice with steel reinforcement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

I think you are incorrect. Compared to modern concrete, roman concrete was more poorly cured at the time of pouring. So when it began to weather and crack, un-cured concrete would mix with water and cure. Thus it was somewhat self healing.

Modern concrete is more uniform in mix, and thus it doesn't leave uncured portions.

We have modern architecture crumbling already less than 100 years after it has been built. I know engineering is about tradeoffs but we should also acknowledge that, as a society, we are so much used to put direct economic cost as the main and sometimes only metric.

You would be very unhappy if you had to live in a house as built 100 years ago. Back then electric lights were rare. even if you had them the wiring wasn't up to running modern life. my house is only 50 years old and it shows signs of the major remodel 30 years ago, and there are still a lot of things that a newer house would all do different that I sometimes miss.

I've lived in a 100 year old house and and in a brand new house, they both had issues. That also both had advantages too. Oddly the older house had a better designed kitchen. Our lives change over time and our housing has to adjust to that too.

Yes, QA should exist, and should be managed by Operations.

I've been places where devs have no idea what the product-as a whole-does. They just work on the feature of the sprint and throw the code over the wall. Their testing consists of if: it compiled==it passed. They have no idea how to even start actually testing if it's not on the happy path.

I been in places where the code accomplished the spec, but in the most lazy way possible so it appeared to work but was useless outside of what the tests looked for.

I knew one QA guy that was amazing but was so overloaded because management kept hiring "cheap" QA that were actively making his life worse.

I'm a tech writer right now at a tech company and a dev just sent over an LLM generated "doc" that's referring to things that don't exist.

Neither management nor dev has learned anything from Therac-25. QA is hard.

When I was young I took a tour of an air traffic control center near New York. By the end I knew it was not for me. Everyone looked stressed. Things have gotten so much worse.

This guy was doing at least 3 people's jobs even before the first emergency occurred.

Then it was an inevitable cascade failure situation. It was never his fault.

Management failed here. If its stupid but it works, its not stupid, is the old saying, but the reality I've seen is its still stupid but you got lucky. -Maxim 43

The luck finally ran out.

> Management failed here

And who was managing here? Do we dare point the finger at Congress and the POTUS for creating the conditions necessary for this to happen?

I hope the final report does point the finger. As far as politicians are concerned, accountability is for suckers.

If I remember right in many of the outlying areas of England the post people would serve the same purpose, though recently there have been cutbacks so they can't spend time. I also saw an estimate that people are giving $7 Trillion in unpaid caregiving services to family and friends. I'm sure the capitalists would love to be able to tap into that, but they have always been anti-civilization that way.

We can pay one another to look after each other's parents. Watch GDP, taxable income, and payment processor fee revenue rise!

US Extra license holder checking in. I'm also involved with a local ham group because we live in an earthquake zone.

I set up a computer for an engineering department. It was an IBM PS/2. They wanted to run AutoCAD and Ventura Publisher, one used extended memory and the other expanded.

I ended up making batch files that swapped around autoexec.bat and config.sys files so they could run.

Had an amateur radio friend tell me about a time he found something transmitting interference that looked like a pole mounted transformer but it was upside down and not connected to anything. He reported it to the FCC and it vanished in a couple of days.

Isn't this the expected outcome when someone reports a device that interferes with communications? They find the owner and the device is fixed or removed.

That effect was also used for the V'ger energy cloud in ST:TMP.

Location: Orem, Utah

  Remote: Yes

  Willing to relocate: Yes

  Technologies: Technical Writing, Information Development, User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI), Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering

  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephan-fassmann/

  Email: stephan /dot/ fassmann /at/ gmail /dot/ com

I created documentation that allowed customers to successful self-service reducing support calls by 60%.

I expanded the knowledge base with 200+ articles, reducing support call duration by 40%.

I spearheaded a tiger team when I found that customers were not getting the license keys they paid, and the database team misplaced many customers in a migration, saving $50 million in customer accounts.

Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.

I was digging around my home state of Indiana's marriage records from the 1800s as part of my ongoing genealogy hobby when I came across the absolutely brilliant way they indexed information. The marriages were recorded sequentially, and that index number was written in special alphabetically tagged pages with the grooms surname and the page number. The brides surname was used as well.

Generally a new book was stared in each county each year.

So, even if there were an error in the indexing, generally you could find a record in 3 operations, doing an exhaustive search was quite unlikely.

The information age might have started when manufacturing stopped fitting into a single human’s head:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250215223917/https://solar.low...

It was the killer app for personal computers as well. From Lotus123 to my family's small business in a tiny country that could only afford a computer in 92 for the business.

Indeed. That's why I am doubtful about LLMs, they just aren't doing something particularly well or solving a basic problem. No one in their right mind would let an LLM do their accounting. Just today I was looking something up and that AI summary was just so wrong. How can I trust it with anything important?

Accounting is integer arithmetic.

Geometry is more or less floating point arithmetic and trigonometry.

LLMs are very lossy text compression. Just like JPEG and MP3 it helps with distilling down the text of the entire Internet in some way.

We can even get reddit recommendations for putting glue onto pizza.

You can't judge AI in general and LLMs in particular by the abysmal Google summaries.

Any titles or resources you have found particularly interesting?

Warning: opening a can of worms. Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)

Wow, I've had an interest in the history of note-taking but that is a huge list. Have you read all those books? Do you have a top 5?

Yeah, this subject is a bit of a rabbit hole. I've read about half of the so far. That's my list of sources from those that I have so far.

I would say start with:

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (This is a fast micro history that hits the highlights.)

* Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair (She is a scholar that has a lot on the subject.)

* Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini (This is a collection of pretty deep essays.)

* Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski (This is about the development of paper-based databases.)

Thanks for taking the time, I appreciate it. If you write anything on the topic I'd be interested in reading it.