> When the National Association of Realtors signed a landmark $418 million settlement in March, economists and academics predicted that the deal — which included an agreement to upend key practices concerning how real estate agents are paid — would create the most significant shift to the industry in a century.
There were many ventures in the past that got investors without a current profitable going concern. Oil & mining speculation, chartering boat crews to go on exploration expeditions and more.
I know theres this whole joke about being pre-revenue on the Silicon Valley TV show, but getting investors in order to be able to build a business which becomes profitable after goes back a long time. Like a really long time.
I’m traveling so can’t look on the shelf, but off the top of my head I’d recommend The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945, R. V. Jones, 1978.
I first read this book when I was starting out as a Dev some 20 years ago. It made a huge impression and is still relevant. Some things I remember off the top of my head.
- It was the first time I came across Occams Razor. This really helped me understand how to approach debugging issues and generally dealing with problems.
- It discusses the dangers of people who don't understand areas at a technical level being in charge of programs that depend on those technical things. Even more so when they have an inflated ego. Apparently Churchill was very good at seeing through this.
- If I'm remembering correctly, there was a section about a practical joke someone played on their apartment neighbour that involved swapping out their pet tortoise for gradually larger versions. I very recently read a Roald Dahl childrens book to my kid which had this exact story. Now I have no idea if this actually happened as RV Jones wrote, or if it was a well known story at the time that Roald Dahl also adapted.
- The dangers of making assumptions.
I'm sure there are more. It's a worthwhile and highly entertaining read regardless.
It doesn’t though. I’ve left entire knowledge bases and bulletproof tools behind and haven’t looked back. Constant maintenance is a sign of shitty design. A hallmark of craftsmanship is leaving a supportable low maintenance environment in your wake - most people’s jobs exist in a world of shitty products and the maintenance environment around them. Linus Torvalds or Ray Eames could live wherever the fuck they wanted and their impact to the “backbone” of the world would still be immeasurable.
> Constant maintenance is a sign of shitty design. A hallmark of craftsmanship is leaving a supportable low maintenance environment in your wake
This rings true to me; I am no amazing programmer but things I have built (which managers complained took a bit too long) have just chugged along; I have almost never received a call about something broke badly or had major rollbacks etc. My longest record is a program I built 19 years ago which is still in use.
I had a role developing systems of increasing complexity of hardware, software, and interfaces and my mantra / threshold for development was always “no phone calls”. I sought to make a project robust enough to support like any other by on-site and field staff and direct my attention to the next challenge.
19 years is incredible! Congratulations on a job well done for nearly a quarter century!
Grass is literally a hellscape for pollinators and the only thing that spends time on most lawns is a mower. I don’t understand it either.
“My family gets to see me swear at my old cars that get 10mpg that I insist on owning and somehow justify by imagining they’re learning anything beyond another datapoint as to why we shouldn’t all own and maintain lifeless landscapes and pollution machines that only serve to stroke our fragile egos”
I don’t have any grass of my own but just enjoyed a patch above the Dufferin terasse in Quebec City.
For others interested in alternative options to maintaining an otherwise lifeless lawn Re:wild is an organization dedicated to finding solutions to bring pollinators and biodiversity back to our cities and neighborhoods.
I implemented RabbitMQ based messaging queues as a mechanism to coordinate execution among discrete components of a handful of ambitious laboratory automation systems ~4-8 years ago.
Given a recent opportunity to rethink messaging based architectures, I chose the simplicity and flexibility of Redis to implement stack and queue based data-structures accessible across distributed nodes.
With even a handful of nodes, it was challenging to coordinate a messaging based system and the overhead of configuring a messaging architecture, essentially developing an ad-hoc messaging schema with each project (typically simple JSON objects), and relatively opaque infrastructure that often required advanced technical support led messaging systems to fall out of favor for me.
Kafka seems to be the current flavor of the day as far as messaging based systems, but I don't think I'll ever support a system that approaches the throughput required to even think about implementing something like Kafka in the laboratory automation space - maybe there's a use case for high-content imaging pipelines?
Right now, I'd probably choose Redis for intra-system communication if absolutely necessary, then something like hitting a Zapier webhook with content in a JSON object to route information to a different platform or software context, but I'm not in a space where I'm handling Terabytes of data or millions of requests a second.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
It's an observation, not an proposal. And its are worrisome one if true, because the young people are constantly exposed to quiet extreme opinions, lies and outrage influencers etc.
I.e. we've got people unironically saying they'd rather have their kids encounter a brown bear in the woods then an unknown man. That's how delusional people are becoming.
If the observation holds true, then the next 60+ years are basically locked into getting extremely bad...
Just to add as a caveat that Wohlleben's books are regarded quite critically by most forest ecologists I know. The general consensus seems to be that he picks up on real phenomena and is a vivid science communicator, but has a tendency to greatly exaggerate what we know.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/16/realestate/realtor-commis...