I think i can handle this code by hand in fact it’s better than code I have handled by hand. (at a cursory glance.)
In my day - I think it was around 2000 – I was handed a 5000 line perl script that both responded to CGI bin requests to run a store and kicked off fulfillment of the orders. Inside that script, it had two 1500 line long subroutines that sometimes navigated internally via goto.
We refactored, and added new features while a profitable business ran on top of the code. You don’t get quite the velocity you do on good code, but it’s manageable.
I think there’s a difference between inheriting a codebase that you can freely refactor, and contributing to someone else’s open source project.
I’m usually trying to find the smallest practical change to accomplish my goal: giving them less to review / consider, and keeping the architecture close to their preferred style.
What this mainly says to me is that my life is going to get much worse - as Amazon logistics cannot deliver to my house.
I used to be a big user of Amazon prime, but they recently swapped over to logistics for my rural area which has no cell service and huge distances between houses and that apparently means they can’t deliver. They try and packages sit at the local warehouse for a couple of weeks before being sent back to Amazon.
Originally, some drivers would be foolish enough to try to come up here without cell, but by and large, they were unable to find the property- mainly because the house is not visible from the road, even if the mailbox is on the road, and mapping apps do a bad job. So I’m assuming the drivers don’t get paid or in some other way get punished and this means that a bunch of Christmas presents didn’t show up, and we stopped using Amazon entirely.
Since that we’ve already had a problem with one vendor we purchased from directly that tried to send something to us via Amazon logistics, and it got returned to them. This was not mentioned on the webpage, and when we contacted them, they got really angry with us for giving them an “undeliverable address” – they literally did not want to give us a refund. They really didn’t like: It’s deliverable by USPS, UPS, and FedEx as a response. But eventually, we got a refund.
I’m assuming this is going to be my future more and more now.
It's really unfortunate. I used to order from Amazon a lot when they mostly handed off to USPS.
I can get Amazon logistics to deliver where I live, but it's pretty unreliable. Usually delayed, or it doesn't arrive until 8pm and given how Amazon treats their drivers, I hate being part of that problem no one should have to be out making home deliveries that late.
I'd much prefer if they just kept using USPS. Public service and reliable, and usually here by noon.
it's a convoluted path to get there, but you can put in delivery instructions into your profile that get surfaced to AMZN delivery folk. I had a similar issue where the AMZN maps would send drivers to a non-existent intersection.
After putting in step-by-step instructions, it's been much less of an issue.
I did do that. And I think that most of the drivers are not local and the comments just made it more likely they would skip on doing what was going to be clearly a difficult delivery.
However, even after my third revision of the notes – to just remove them entirely – deliveries didn’t pick up again, so I don’t know. It’s opaque to me.
I thought the main benefit of Prime was guaranteed fast shipping, since free shipping can still be had without Prime. So the shipping has gotten worse while the price gets raised to subsidize the production of Citadel?
I don’t think most people can do this 100% of the time. I actually think if you can do this 100% of the time you’re probably a zen master.
I think most people over the age of 25 can do this maybe 80% of the time. And most of them can keep it under control enough that they only look a little dysfunctional, the other 20% of the time. (although I definitely know a few extroverts who don’t look dysfunctional, they look like the life of the party – but that’s them being dysfunctional and stressing out and trying to make everyone love them. That’s their 20%.)
This is baffling to hear dude, I literally canvas with 1000s of people before. All these people have no issues interacting with complete strangers in hostile areas withe ease. The amount of people doing this is in the tens of millions, from all walks of life too.
Definitely check out a therapist because this type of thinking isn't only toxic to yourself but it's not how the world really works.
I do ranch work in a place with a lot of iron in the soil. I often have these sand sized grains of dirt in my port. But I had it in a lightning days as well. I just hate ports.
Before MagSafe, this used to kill phones. Now my son has a phone without a port, but it’s not dead.
Those ports are most of the time, at least in the android land IDK about iphone, on daughter boards and easy to replace. Even though in a perfect world this should not happen, still it is possible to do without too much of a hastle
Most of phone repair parts available to consumers are factory leaks. They are scraps and/or stolen stocks. They only exist because law enforcement in China is still, sort of strategically left, lacking. They are destined to go away as time goes by and/or parts are standardized and/or parts supply are legalized and/or mandated.
This seems like the ideal use case for those 'rugged' phone cases with flaps over the ports, no? Not ideal, but certainly a lot easier than having to clean gunk out of the port constantly.
But cloudflare is also just difficult, I’m on Starlink (because where I am my only other option is Hughes net), and my browser of choice is Safari. No vpn, and only boring ad blockers.
I routinely blocked by Cloudflare from viewing things and occasionally, I am blocked from buying things. Just this weekend, it was $100 worth of athletic wear. I just keep clicking the box and it never lets me complete the purchase. After the 7th or 10th time I go and find another vendor that would actually sell to me. I was more annoyed than usual because the website already had my credit card at this point – but as this article proves there are reasons to block an order even with a credit card.
I liked the apple II, and the TRS 80 as I rather like basic. And then I didn’t hate DOS, and then I actively hated the graphical shell of Windows 3, but could not afford a Macintosh -so suffered through it where I had to, but mainly used DOS. Then I discovered UNIX, and did almost all of my work on a timeshare - in the early 90s!
Then Windows 95 came out and I actively hated it, but did think it was amazingly pretty - somehow this was the impetus for me to get a pc again, which I put Windows NT on. Which was profitable for freelance gigs in college. Soon after that, I dual booted it to Linux and spent most of my time in Slackware.
After that, I graduated and had enough money to buy a second rig, which I installed OS/2 warp on - which was good for side gigs. And I really liked. A lot. But my day job required that I have a Windows NT box to shell into the Solaris servers as we ran. Then I got a better class of employer and the next several let me run a Linux box to connect to our solaris (or Aix) servers.
Next my girlfriend at the time got a PowerBook G4 and installed OS X on it. It was obviously amazing. Windows XP came out, and it was once again so much worse than Windows NT - and crashed so much more - which was odd as it was based on Windows NT. (yes 98 was before this but it was really bad). Anyhow, right about here the Linux box I was running at home, died. And it was obvious that I was not going to buy an XP box, so I bought my first Mac.
And it’s been the same for the last 25 years - every time I look at a Windows box it’s horrible. I pretty much always have a Linux box headless somewhere in the house, and one rented in the cloud, and a Mac for interacting with the world.
And like the parent I actively dislike windows. And that’s interesting because I’ve liked most other operating systems I’ve used in my life, including MS-DOS. Modern windows is uniquely bad.
You know, sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes it does. And also I’ve been known to forget it overnight and wake up to moldy clothes.
I have a friend who will say things like “I have to go at 3” and get up at 3 on the dot without even looking at her watch/phone. I’m not that guy and I need buzzers, timers, and ambient displays all working together anything done at a time.
OT but if your washing gets mouldy after being left in the washing machine overnight, you need to clean your washing machine (and/or use more detergent).
A bit OT but you may want a side loader. It's obviously not ideal to leave it overnight but the few times that's happened to me there isn't any mold. I'm guessing you have a top loader, it may not have been cleaned in a long time, and that it's in a basement that's prone to mold also.
I recall my mother’s family conversing via mail in the early 80’s - and she would write one 10 page letter a month as a reply (max) - that would 3 or 4 mails a year with any particular sibling (and probably 1 phone call - but phone calls to alaska were expensive, and you wouldn’t say all you wanted to).
This is not always a bad thing. The example I always use of why it’s good that Amazon has knock off parts, is a Jacuzzi heating element.
Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.
Add to this that the Jacuzzi part - for my model at least - has a reputation of just dying at two years plus one day, while the Chinese parts frequently last 3-5 years.
In the end, you save yourself quite a lot of money, and time by replacing less frequently, by buying the knock off. And where I live, you couldn’t get the knock off otherwise.
The important thing of course is to know that you’re getting a knock off, and have made that choice in intentionally. Your story does suck - and there can be lots of reasons both good and bad to make a knock off.
>> Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.
Possibly the reason the OEM price is so high is because it is backed by huge liability insurance (e.g., you get into a Jacuzzi and get electrocuted). I'd pay for that assurance. By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The real reasons oem parts cost more is always some combination of these three things:
1. They use more expensive processes and materials.
2. They charge more because they can. People are willing to pay a premium for "genuine" parts.
3. They have a "dealer network" to support, which is convenient but expensive to maintain.
#1 is the only thing I want to pay for. Ultimately it's on a case by case basis whether oem is worth it and you never know for sure.
But I'm really thankful non-oem parts exist, just as long as they're labeled as such and not comingled.
There's also
4) Manufacturers could position the price of spares at a level that's intended to provide pressure to scrap salvagable devices and put the customer back into the market. The classic "it will be $150 to send the guy out, and the magic PCB is $250, while an entire new washer is $550, are you sure you want to throw money into an N-years-old unit? (Bear in mind this calculus applies to the people who are not even considering DIY repair)
5) Manufacturers are burdened with selling the entire spares catalog, while third parties may concentrate on the highest-turnover items that they can sell easily.
Years ago, I looked at the service manual for a 1980s stereo receiver, and the manufacturer literally starred the parts they mentioned as most commonly needed for replacements. (The part I needed was, unsurprisingly, on that list)
I wish we'd see more in the way of "open PCB" appliances. 90% of "white goods" appliances (washers/driers/dishwashers/fridges/stoves/microwaves) have a board somewhere that reads a membrane keypad and a few sense switches and activates some relays and displays a timer. You could probably design a master PCB that replaced hundreds of different models, with different cable harnesses and firmware configurations for each model.
This would dramatically reduce the number of SKUs to stock, but at the cost of the master PCB probably costing a few dollars more because they can't strip out every non-essential component for lower-end models.
>> I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The part goes from $30 to $280 due to 5 or 6 factors, which you've outlined well. Insurance is one of many factors. Insurance isnt high because they expect things to go wrong -- insurance forces better QA/QC and overall processes so there isnt a payout -- all those precautions raise the price. It aligns everyone to focus on quality outcomes to prevent payouts.
>>By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
> They also have sufficient insurance that a payout doesn't tank their company. I don't think their risk avoidance translates into your risk avoidance.
The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications. Also, insurance companies will not payout (and hence bankrupt the company) in cases of fraud or gross negligence.
The system is not perfect, but it exists to align interests.
The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications.
Those certifications aren't worth as much as I thought they were. I just took apart a UL-certified power strip with scorched plastic, which is a significant fire hazard. It had an LED that was fed from the 120V line through a 15K 0.5-watt resistor.
a UL certification will hardly be the only one in place for a commercial insurance firm to guarantee a jacuzzi. Just imagine the risk of electrocution.
Just look at it from a retail standpoint -- perhaps you have car insurance.
- (where I live) You are forced to have a driver's license
- (where I live) Even if your spouse claims not to drive, they wont insure me unless all other adults in my household have licenses
- i'm forced to pay more if i drive an unsafe car vs a safe one
- I can pay less if I have a LoJack or other safety device
- I can pay further less if I take a driver's safety course which runs 5hrs long
- I can pay further less if I install a OBD-2 device sharing my driver behavior
- I risk having my insurance cancelled If I do something bad (DUI)
- I risk having no payout if I do something illegal
In my day - I think it was around 2000 – I was handed a 5000 line perl script that both responded to CGI bin requests to run a store and kicked off fulfillment of the orders. Inside that script, it had two 1500 line long subroutines that sometimes navigated internally via goto.
We refactored, and added new features while a profitable business ran on top of the code. You don’t get quite the velocity you do on good code, but it’s manageable.
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