Viewing profile — jwestbury

This is regionally specific. The US south, for instance, sees higher usage in summer due to air conditioning demand.

> It can't tell you about f better learning is worth it It can, given sufficient inputs in terms of desired outcomes. Of course, desired outcomes are where subjectivity enters into…

Or just give the government reasonable power to enforce things. GDPR, as an example, has been very effective, because the fines which can be levied for violations are genuinely imp…

I'll go further: Three months is too long. Secrets which are used to authenticate and identify should be rotated far more regularly, using infrastructure which treats them as effec…

One of the principal engineers I used to work with at AWS had a saying: "A one-year certificate expiration is an outage you schedule a year in advance." Of course, it's a bit hyper…

University presidents hardly need to be distinguished researchers.

Same -- FAANG, Dropbox, quant hedge fund on my resume, ~10 years of experience, senior engineer. I don't actually want a new job, to be fair, but I prefer to interview at least a c…

Have you worked at Microsoft? I have. Their engineering practices are suspect at best. Nobody in Office actually knows what's going on -- it's difficult to find anyone who actually…

Membership is a hook -- once you have a member, they're more likely to buy from you. It's not really a marketing channel, per se, but it is a method of increasing sales. "Marketing…

I've been in tech for over a decade. I know all of your examples -- except a11y and i18n. Numeronym proliferation is a bit insane right now, and really needs to be stopped. :(

At least in media, it is. And, of course, King of the Hill skewered the idea by having Bobby get addicted to cigarettes when Hank used this punishment.

> My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way …

It's not, though - it's about blackholing unknown sources. Yes, this makes it incredibly difficult to self-host or to start up a new provider in the space. But from the perspective…

> - Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted. I assume this has an implicit "in the USA"? Trying this in Europe would be an awfully bad idea -- GDPR has teeth…

Honestly, confusion here is just poor driver education in the US. HAWK signals follow normal patterns: Amber is caution/be prepared to stop. Red is stop. Flashing red is "stop unti…

Go ask a teacher about how many hours they work -- it's more than the 40 hours a week we in tech work, generally. And their summers are often full of required continuing education …

It's both, really. Even if we limit this to dynamically-typed, interpreted languages, Python is far more maintainable that Ruby both because the language and the culture take a sta…

> Maintaining Ruby is a nightmare. Trying to escape that hell now. The problem with maintaining Ruby is that Ruby is heavily influenced by Perl.

While I do I agree with you -- I studied English lit at university, have translated portions of Beowulf, can read Chaucer aloud in Middle English, and generally love all things med…

Just want to offer some additional context here: "in the US" isn't really necessary. Mental health care is generally broken everywhere. Over here in the UK, waiting lists for "talk…

And what happens when two users manage to get the same result? Does OpenAI need to implement an "/r9k/ algorithm" or something to prevent sufficiently similar results from ever bei…

> With the price hikes, and also just how complicated it is to actually run and maintain IT-Operations in Azure (I can’t speak for AWS) we’re now in a world where more and more org…

I don't know - I lived <20 miles from an Amazon warehouse, but saw shipping suddenly become 7-day on Prime most of the time back in 2021. I'd already tried to disentangle myself fr…

> We can't blame automakers for marketing whatever they think will sell best that passes the regulatory bar. Why not? This is such a cynical take, and I don't think it goes without…