If you're planning on working there for 10+ years and you are well treated, do glue work. Otherwise do flashy stuff. First, you can change jobs any time to make it someone else's problem, and second, it you can always blame the "unglued" code for any of your own inefficiencies/f'ups.
When people want to find something or learn about something, they go to YouYube. That is where or how the majority of people find and consume content these days. There is also Google search, but again, these are not books. If your audience is limited, then target niche keywords. Same principle applies. Videos about even the most esoteric of topics still get traffic due to YouTube's popularity.
> It's easy to distinguish the worthless degrees from the valuable ones. Google the starting salaries of each major.
Agreed.
> If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.
Not just them. Their parents, the school, etc. There are so many "simple" things to know. Too many for them to always be obvious, even when they "obviously" should be.
A mistake that a million young students make is a mistake worth updating the educational system to handle better.
And as an objective practical matter, it is always on society. Society systematically loses masses of individual potential by not providing more guidance when it matters. (And perversely turning education into an easy loan factory, regardless of expected income, the opposite of good guidance.)
I picked my major entirely on my own. My parents didn't advise me about it, nor did the school.
I have been known to advise young people that their intended major was akin to taking a vow of poverty, and they all insisted they were following their dream, and are now working at minimum wage jobs.
I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for students who discover after they graduate that their chosen major has no value. How do they go through 4 years of college never checking such things? Google "starting salary for history majors", for example.
At Caltech, everyone knew that ChE paid the best, and AY degrees were worthless (this was long before google). The AY majors usually did a double major - AY for fun, and the other degree for money.
I would assume that students getting into competitive schools were more informed (whether or not that resulted in a good decision).
> I don't have a whole lot of sympathy
It is a big objective problem, for the students and society. So even without feelings, some kind of incentives need to be better aligned with reality.
Limiting student loan repayment terms, with a limited percentage of student income recoverable to banks, would certainly incentivize banks not to help students get in trouble.
Telling basket weaving majors that they are welcome to do it for love, but to expect to be paying for the degree themselves up front, or with an ongoing job, represents the desired outcome, in simplified terms.
It's a lot easier today with google to be informed than in my day. All the information needed is a couple of searches away.
In any case, and I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but when you're 18 it's time to take responsibility for your choices, and time to stop saying your choices are other peoples' fault.
> I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but when you're 18 it's time to take responsibility for your choices
I don’t think that’s unpopular or the least bit controversial. Obvious, no?
But ending the story there isn’t productive. So perhaps it is not a popular reason to not consider other factors & improvements.
Individual lack of conscientiousness isn’t the only factor.
Students being handed loans, for whatever ill thought out career plan, with no immediate need for payback, facilitated by market warping government encouragement, schools whose incentive is obvious (they get most of that money), and banks who see students as easy marketing targets, is a systematic upfront incentive/road to the original ill thought out career plan, but now saddled with overwhelming debt.
Such a colossal amount of economically mismatched careers and debt that the topic is a regular subject of national politics.
There is an entire system of active influence, causality, conflicts of interest & responsibility there too.
Society (and parents) still should have some responsibility on educating young people about career prospects of different degrees. Too many in older generations think any degree will land their children a job, and thus encourage them to study whatever they like.
I think school system is hugely failing students if they are not instructed and then capable of spending one or two afternoons on simply googling and looking at career prospects and what different jobs actually might entail. And then at least with minimal criticality thinking is that for them.
I am pretty sure there is no careers you cannot find some information on with rather simple searches.
This belief that "a degree, any degree" is sufficient must have started after I went to University (mid-90s), because when I was a teenager, it was drilled into us that we need to not only go to University, but we need to major in something lucrative. Nobody, from parents to guidance counsellors, was saying "Oh, just go to college and major in anything, it doesn't matter!"
As I mentioned before, there are no jobs for AY majors, even from Caltech. I don't suggest abolishing it. There were many AY majoring students, and they had open eyes about it. There wasn't any whining about it.
We have already dumbed college down so much to make it accessible to so many. The last thing we need to do is dumb it down further so that everybody can go. 17 years of education isn't really any better than 13. The only reason a college degree was ever worth anything was because it was taught at a high level that most people would never be able to pass.
Which ones? I know a few countries with those qualities, some of them filter out the bad students really early on or into another stream of education (typically slower, lower quality), as in before you're 9, not 20.
Cheap studies don't turn students into mindless debauchery-loving zombies, but they also put a pretty hard cap on the professors' salaries. As long as your school is really a not-for-profit organization, salaries will be mediocre.
Elite American universities can attract top scientific talent from overseas with good salaries and very well equipped labs, because they have the money. This, in turn, attracts foreign students.
It's just human nature, and human nature is the same everywhere.
I know a German who spent over 20 years in the German university system, taking advantage of every free program so she wouldn't have to get a job.
For a well known trope, the spawn of first generation wealthy people tend to dissipate that wealth. They didn't work for it, and so they don't value it. It's why people look down on nepotism. Things not earned are not valued.
And I know an American who spent years trying to get through a degree program that he never ended up completing because he was too burned out having to work multiple jobs to live at the same time. Just like I know plenty of Swedes who have and continue to study, developing their knowledge and curiosity for free while being enthusiastically productive members of society. We all have anecdotes.
Many educators have pointed out that cuts in government funding for higher education in the US now mean that the student is the paying customer and, as they say, "the customer is always right". Institutions have financial motivations to overlook students' incompetence, cheating, and other misbehavior as long as they keep paying tuition fees.
My dad (career military) told me that army boots lasted 3 times longer when the GIs bought them out of their uniform allowance (and could keep unspent funds), rather than being issued boots. He always laughed about that.
When I was old enough to do work, he'd have me buy my own shoes :-)
Only very large commercial cutting board makers would be able to accommodate custom design orders from a tool like this. It would have to be extremely constrained in terms of the tools available to the ship (like the maximum capacity of sanders), availability of space and clamps, and most importantly availability of appropriate wood.
I wish that were the case, but there's not much that can be automated with a CNC in the production of these board patterns (I've tried, a lot). The parts that can be aren't related to actually making the pattern itself: flattening, handhold routing, and the juice groove.
There are some generic-ish jigs that a CNC and 3D printer help with, but those don't tend to change with board pattern.
Economies of scale would be realized by making lots of the same board, but then you're not doing custom one-offs.
...which still begs the question - why does it need to be an entirely different service?
Probably answering my own question, but the main reason I can think of would be if your app doesn't have some kind of business admin panel capability.
I suppose my bias is also that in my sphere of web dev, we build these business panels pretty frequently, so feature flags and a UI for toggling them is something that makes sense to do within the app rather than add a third party service (and associated cost + potential latency) for it.
You mean an admin panel on a server application, right? At my current job, I'm on a platform team that supports hundreds of applications. Each of them have their own admin panels.
However, there are settings that apply to all of them in our library code. For those, we use feature flags, and they are loaded from a network service, environment variables, code and config files. The overriding logic is complicated for legacy reasons and prone to bugs, so we are moving to a centralized feature flag system.
Fair, that makes sense. Not a very common use case I think unless you're talking more about heavy use of microservices that need a feature flag across the entire suite.
> Japanese saws are typically very thin, again requiring much less metal. This means that the saws cut on a pull stroke, rather than a push stroke like European saws. Since the saw is much more flexible this requires more skill. But you end up with a very thin kerf and minimal waste.
Japanese non-disposible saws seem quite beefy and more comparable to western saws in thickness. The super thin disposibles are a modern innovation (impulse hardening not being available in the Edo period...). Also, western joinery saws are very thin.
The fact that it is flexible does not affect its use because it doesn't flex when you pull it, so that's not something you have to worry about. In fact they are ideal beginner saws because they are higher quality (than, say, whatever you can get at home depot for $40) and don't need to be sharpened (because these days they are all replaceable).
> Much traditional Japanese carpentry involves complex joints made of hardwood,
Actually most Japanese woods are quite soft. Most japanese planes wouldn't be able to handle Maple or Hickory, to say nothing of the harder exotics.
> not typically fastened with metal (e.g., nails, screws).
Timberframing is a uncommon but definitely still a thing in the US and Europe. And 2x4 stick framing with metal fasteners is also a thing in Japan, having gained popularity b/c of its simplicity in recent decades.
> The amount of slop you’d see in an 18th-century metal-fastened European joint would have been unthinkable to a contemporaneous Japanese carpenter.
I'd put 18th century european fine furniture against japanese fine furniture any day. It's not until the 20th century that you saw a decline in western skills. The secret to the japanese is that they kept the tradition and skills alive, whereas in the west it's had to be revived.
> Japanese non-disposible saws seem quite beefy and more comparable to western saws in thickness.
I’ve got a handful of forged 240mm ryoba annd dozuki in my shop that are notably thinner than disposables according to my digital calipers
> And 2x4 stick framing with metal fasteners is also a thing in Japan, having gained popularity b/c of its simplicity in recent decades.
Agreed. I’ve heard nearly all new construction is stud construction these days.
> Most japanese planes wouldn't be able to handle Maple or Hickory, to say nothing of the harder exotics.
I often see this repeated in online woodworking forums but my experience here has been different albeit limited to kanna blades from two makers.
> I'd put 18th century european fine furniture against japanese fine furniture any day. It's not until the 20th century that you saw a decline in western skills.
Agreed here too. Furniture studies from that time period make this evident. Western tools from that time period don’t differ as much either.
> I often see this repeated in online woodworking forums but my experience here has been different albeit limited to kanna blades from two makers.
They are bedded at roughly 40 degrees (nothing to do with the metal, admittedly). Unless there's another factor at play, I don't see how that'd work for a smoother on 1500+ janka woods.
