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Nothing compares to the old school large dell lcds. I had one years ago that was a furnace.


I had thought it had been used during the gulf war in a friendly fire event.


The Missouri got raked with it from its escort ship - not pleasant for anyone concerned I'd say.

http://billgx.com/2019/10/autonomous-friendly-fire/


tldr: the Missouri fired a chaff and the other ships CIWS was all “not in my airspace” and started shooting at it even though the Missouri was behind the target. Interesting, I wonder if the whole battlegroup has synced systems now to avoid such things, e.g. 1) I’m going to launch something, everyone else disregard it as a threat and 2) if a threat has a friendly behind it, don’t shoot it.

Maybe 2) is more of a judgement call since a few bullet holes is probably preferential to the alternative.


IFF in any capacity on Phalanx seems like a poor match.

At ranges that close... you really want a "deconstruct anything in the air" device, not a "consider what you're about to hit" device.

Which I'd imagine has been designer pushback on complicating it and going that route.

Safety through deciding what mode to set it in; not through leaving it alone and forgetting about it.


I don’t disagree, but I’m sure they had to come up with some mitigation after this. If each ship is shooting down the other ships primary/secondary/whatever countermeasure then in a worst case scenario you and your sister ships are only left with your CIWS. And they might still be busy shooting at your sister ships chaffs to deal with the real threat. I don’t know much about it, I just found it interesting.

Seems a bit like Star Trek - “Their shields go down for a split second when they fire”. Maybe the system goes dark for a second to avoid shooting down outgoing items? Syncing the shields might make this better (or expose other weaknesses?)


The issue is time.

Say it's a YJ-83 clone, so around mach 1.4 terminal velocity (476 m/s).

Phalanx tracks at 10km, engages at around 4km.

So it has ~8.4 seconds of engagement time to try to destroy the incoming missile.

... And that's a relatively slow modern target. A P-800 gets up to mach 2.4. BrahMos is mach 3?

I'd guess the Navy would generally rather keep CIWSs on a hair trigger, and just space their ships further apart in combat situations.

And afaik, most of the CIWSs have been removed in favor of RAM, since the gun-limited engagement ranges don't make much sense anymore.


Yep that's the one


Not that I have found... My team runs our virtualization infra for end user computing (VDI) and our dev div runs almost entirely on MacOS. One of the frequent requests we have as we scale out more globally is to get virtual Mac desktops. There are a few providers that we have found, stateside but they don't scale well. There is of course EC2 offerings from AWS, which is basically what they are doing at Github with Mac minis.


We're looking at something similar as we migrate from VMWare. Any recommendations for VDI for Mac?


No not really. We have found a few smaller players but their ability to scale concerned me. We talked to one and I asked "if we do a new acquisition and I need 2000 Mac desktops in a month. What would you do?". I was surprised that they were as honest as they were, they simply said they could not procure that many in that period of time. We are a big AWS shop, I think a solution we are toying with is using Mac ec2 instances and building an orchestration layer that essentially setup one for a user, load the base tooling, enroll in MDM and email the customer with login details. Im not sure what protocol we would use yet though.... anyway... tldr NO.


I love the theme of this blog but the side bar just disappears when scrolling which is kinda jarring.


What a fantastic blog post!


Good lord, HN nerds are just as bad as the Instagrammers they detest. Nobody is going to makerspaces and losing fingers and whining on social media.


Re-read the GP's statement. The parties are not at makerspaces. You just would expect to meet people at makerspaces who know where the local "weird parties" are, because they're the people making the shoddy contraptions for these parties.


You may want to re-read the thread.


(Make sure I wasn’t a narc) What does this mean in the context? Were they afraid of getting shut down during covid or something? I’m assuming that is what you meant.


Could be roids. When I used to powerlift that stuff was all too common. When I was kid lifting with the grownups they sold GHB next to the protein bars.


It's definitely the corona virus lockdown mandates. To me, with the mention of papering over the windows _so no one could see the no masks on inside_, it 100% indicates that they wanted to make sure he wasn't going to call the police and get the gym shut down. The people wanted a gym community and so they built one while heavily vetting who was allowed to know about or enter the space, specifically so they could avoid the eyes of the government during the lockdowns.


Yes my thought was juicing. Beyond the obvious bodybuilders in gyms the world over, when fitness is needed past a certain level of seriousness it’s much more common than expected.


> papered over the windows so prying eyes couldn’t observe the no-masks inside

I inferred it was lockdown/facemask or otherwise Corona related. I knew a couple of underground bars/restaurants that operated in a similar "speakeasy" fashion back in the 'rona times.


'actual stupidity'... gotta love the general disdain of the 'run of the mill business drone'... It's funny my wife is a run of the mill business drone. She thinks IT is a bunch of assholes. I would say she is probably right. Way to keep things going.


and IT "assholes" think the run of the mill business drones are "assholes" as well. Their inability to be effective at their jobs tend to make IT lives worse because they can't understand what IT workers do but IT workers can understand what the basic run of the mill business drones do...and their work tends to be a bunch of pointless meetings.

Yeah, I work at a corporate office and have made it a mission to see what kind of work they do, and majority of the time...it's pointless meetings and meetings that involve pointing to IT workers and saying "do this". I check many of their daily schedules, and see what kind of stuff they talk about in meetings...just wow. Am I an "asshole"? Sure you can call me that, but I can call them useless in turn because I wonder how many more qualified people out there who can replace these workers.


> but IT workers can understand what the basic run of the mill business drones do...and their work tends to be a bunch of pointless meetings.

What an ironic comment.

Sorry, any early-career worker looking down their nose at anyone else (or pretending to have any idea what their job entails, especially because they “looked at a calendar”) might as well go back to middle school. They definitely need to grow up.


While true, it’s very fair to say that many (possibly most) meetings in a corporate environment contain a lot of absolutely pointless time wasting.

I say this with the perspective of someone who has slowly had to have many more of these meetings added to his calendar over the years.

Some are very important, some are reasonable but often bloated, but so many are a waste of time.

At the very least: they’re 5-10 mins of work spread over an hour. It’s occasionally maddening.


I find that a lot of engineers don't understand good communication, and definitely don't understand the value of relationships.

When I was really junior, I'd go to meetings and think that the vast majority of the time was wasted. As I became more senior, I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment. You may not need those things for your current task, but your leadership and partner teams may need these things.

Yes, a lot of meetings could be emails, and a lot of meetings could be better run (agendas and objectives in the invite, action items assigned at the end), but unless you're working somewhere awful, most meetings probably have a reasonable purpose and aren't all filler. Lots of jobs require way more meetings, and probably aren't filled with context relevant to you.

Looking down on non-engineering positions is a personality trait I associate with inexperience. It's absolutely something I'd consider when denying a promo.


> When I was really junior, I'd go to meetings and think that the vast majority of the time was wasted. As I became more senior, I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment. You may not need those things for your current task, but your leadership and partner teams may need these things.

100% agree. In early or IC roles, it's easy to think "just let me go do X" (or worse, "talking about X or Y is a waste of time when X is the obvious answer") without seeing the bigger picture that there's tremendous value in making sure other teams are aware of what X is, why it's important, and having a chance to weigh in or ask questions. Certainly there are valid complaints about some people's meetings, but those shouldn't overshadow the alignment/communication value meetings can have.


> I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment.

A lot of that seems to be about office politics, which historically been something which engineers and office workers in general has disliked. It is a generally unhappy fact that relationship building and office alignments is what dictate who get promoted, who get raises, who get the desired assignments and who don't.

It might be true that those who refuse playing that game is associated with inexperience. In my experience, employees who get tired of it generally leave large companies, which leaves behind only inexperience employees or those who enjoy the game.


Looking down on, yes. Suffering nonsense meetings silently? No.

My entire point was that there is a major difference between the two & that while the instinct to look down on others for this organizational symptom is immature, it’s not unfounded or without basis to highlight the issue: they’re blaming the wrong thing however.

And I often find that in those types of meeting communication & relationship building is the absolute last thing that is happening. Most of these meetings are CYA, checklist, type meetings.

Meetings that literally only exist to allow someone to demonstrate they had a meeting about something.

Worse, the actual communication that is happening is usually in side channels.


I'm guessing you're junior, or you'd have more control over these meetings, or have the ability to decline ones that you believed weren't going to be good use of your time.

Having good meeting culture requires everyone involved to improve it. If you want meetings to be better, set them up, add an agenda and objectives, and run the meeting so that it's effective. If you can't run the meeting, if it doesn't have an agenda or objectives, ask the person who created it for them. Ask for action items at the end of the meeting, if no one is calling for them. If it's mostly status meetings, propose a better process to track and communicate status.

If you're working through side channels, you're part of the problem.

Calling people assholes, rather than improving the situation, is an indicator of inexperience.


This is the most wrong, yet condescending and naive, comment I’ve encountered on HN so far.

I’m actually impressed.

Call me in 20 years, maybe you’ll have learned something.


Getting real "toxic positivity" vibes off your whole line of arguments...


Being proactive in changing the situation isn't toxic positivity, and being empathetic with folks in different jobs isn't toxic positivity either.

Assuming people are assholes, and blaming them for situations is just run of the mill toxic. Working through side-channels rather than addressing a problem is also run of the mill toxic.


Nah your stuff came across as blind tolerance which is just pointless unconstructive and solely to placate people's feelings (in such instances unjustifiable/irrational).

Just because Joe or Judy "feels" a certain way doesn't mean it should actually have bearing on anything. Really...

Enough placating those with the least logic and self control.


This attitude is the kind of engineer stereotype we can live without.

People's feeling matter in the long term, because it's the difference between them wanting to work with you, and them being forced to work with you. If I had to pick between a genius coder with awful people skills, and an average coder with exceptional skills, I'd essentially always pick the average one.


Someone's feeling do matter in the long term, which is where it should be dealt with, not in the immediate.

Do you not see the difference?


People's feelings about you are based on a series of accumulated interactions. You can't just "deal with it" later, because that's now how people work. This isn't like tech debt where you can accumulate some and then spend some timing working it down later. If you're consistently an asshole to people, it doesn't matter if you take a little time now and then to try to repair that. Good relationships require taking people's feelings into account and acting consistently.


The context of the discussion was accommodating feeling during meetings, right?

Well that's absolutely not the place for it.

If your little fee fees get hurt you keep it to yourself and focus on the task at hand. Then after the task is complete you either pull the offender aside to address the problem or you bring it to a superior to be addressed. It in no way should have any bearing on the work at hand.

This is basics of work place decorum, right?


> and IT "assholes" think the run of the mill business drones are "assholes" as well. Their inability to be effective at their jobs tend to make IT lives worse because they can't understand what IT workers

Have you ever dealt with an average IT department in a non-tech company? This attitude doesn't help anyone and I really want to believe that only a small minority of tech people think of any other worker anywhere as an "asshole".


I'm a Sr. SE at a large medical device company and can confirm that our IT dept is filled with assholes. We do everything we can to keep systems out of their hands because they are so difficult to work with compared to every other part of the company.

I get they have to deal with a bunch of technical inepts constantly falling for phishing attacks and occasionally teams will make outrageous requests to them that simply can't be done, but their attitude is terrible.

If you ask for something simple but "scary", like a firewall or internal network change, they will immediately assume you are just some idiot and speak dismissively to you in a very obvious manner. It's extremely frustrating because they won't even bother to read your emails that justify the change and will just invent some unrelated excuses about why they can't or say they will get back to you later (they don't).

Ironically the only way to get anything done through them is to have my team members create a bunch of duplicate tickets (1 per person), and schedule multiple pointless meetings with them that essentially just consist of me reading my emails to them out loud.

Non-technical teams in the company get the same treatment but lack the technical background to counter them. Frequently I've had team leaders come to me to get a second opinions on the stuff IT tells them and it bothers me how much they seem to clearly exaggerate the difficulty of things. To the point where I can't help but wonder if they are just pretending to know what they are doing, and use their better-than-you attitude to mask their own ineptitude.

So overall I feel the negative reputation of IT departments is earned.


> and it bothers me how much they seem to clearly exaggerate the difficulty of things.

Scotty Engineering principle at work. I'm no stranger to that, it's often enough the only strategy keeping higher management from completely swamping you with work.


It's not that it usually is the Scotty Engineering principle. It is more often a hedge against unforeseen complications, because if you give a realistic estimate that would be true for 90% of the tickets, the 10% will come to bite you. So to not get chewed up for providing realistic 90%-true estimates, you give 99.9%-true estimates that are far higher, but with just a .1% chance of being screwed instead of a 10% chance. Which is, at 10 tickets per day, getting chewed up daily vs. once every two weeks or so.


reminds me of the saying "don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that guy behind the tree".

Its always us vs them.


[flagged]


What are some typical everyday scenarios where this is applicable to a real business?

Please include all the steps that chatgpt would independently take, like deciding what meetings to schedule, attending them, and presenting at them for example, and specify who would verify chatgpt’s correctness.


Sadly, citing off topic ChatGTP woes and reducing Americans to a broad generalization is not a sign of intelligence either.


Statistically speaking, assuming a normal distribution of intelligence, there is a specific percent where this generalization will start to apply.

Now, I don't know what is this percent, but let's give it a name: the ChatGPT percentile cut line.

My intuition says this line sits to the left of the median, so in a sense you are right, meaning that fewer than 50% of people have a measurable intelligence lower than this line.

However, it can also be higher than 5%, and this means many millions of people can be easily replaced by an automation tool, without any bad consequence.


I find it hard to believe that the intelligence you assume is required to do a person's job is an accurate indication of that person's intelligence.


Those people probably aren't office workers


I someone can't be retrained, and it's not because they're being stubborn, what other reason do you have?

Is it better or worse to assume they're being a problem on purpose?

I won't say 'average' but I will say 'common enough to make changing software a huge issue'.



Many devs are the same, hence loyalty to a language


Unless its Webdev, because from the outside looking in it seems there’s some new fad moving through every few months.


Who's the a-hole:

The person trying to make things better and seeks out knowledge at great cost

Or

The person who is willfully ignorant and actively refuses knowledge handed on a platter?

Because one of those is the typical IT pro and the other is the worker drone....


Don’t worry, the people in IT don’t like the other people in IT. Devs think that security are a bunch of a-holes, DBAs hate the devs, etc etc.


lol

Seriously, some looking down the nose comments


If that was the video I saw yesterday.... wow. That pilot should be thanking every god from every belief. That missle just barely missed him.


What does that even mean? They tried to go 'fallujah' on Kyiv, it failed miserably. Back during Fallujah, if the locals were loaded with Javelins, things might have turned out differently for them as well.


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