Readit NewsThat said, my info is not on the list, I assume it was deleted when I left.
There _has_ to be a collectors' market for this sort of thing. This beanbag was at Theranos!
Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.
He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.
My health teacher was a "permanent substitute" situation where we just watched movies the whole semester and got A's.
One of my math teachers died and we just...never hired a replacement, so nobody learned anything that semester.
Bonus: my driver's education teacher was arrested for a DUI (but not terminated)
These situations were all in different schools in different US states, so the lack of quality control in admin that you describe definitely resonates.
Each word depicted a "thing" at the position I found it. It taught me a lot about what things are. A chair is obviously a separate entity and easy to list, but what about the floor and the separate floorboards? I listed the wall, but I didn't list the paint on the wall.
The bookcase took a lot of effort, because I found that each book in it was a thing by itself and should get listed separately. However, when I was nearly finished, I found a bag in a cabinet, holding ~200 pins. I just counted them and noted down "207 pins"; I didn't feel that each pin was unique enough to warrant separate entries.
I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.
Copied from wiki:
"Every composite material object is made up of elementary particles, and the only such composite objects are living organisms. A consequence of this view is that everyday objects such as tables, chairs, cars, buildings, and clouds do not exist. While there seem to be such things, this is only because there are elementary particles arranged in specific ways. For example, where it seems that there is a chair, Van Inwagen says that there are only elementary particles arranged chairwise."
Is this not evident? Because using AI is much cheaper and faster. Instead of finding the right guitar, paying for a good photographer, location, decoration, and all the associated logistics, a graphics designer can write a prompt that gets you 90% of the vision, for orders of magnitude less cost and time. AI is even cheaper and faster than using stock images and talented graphic designers, which is what we've been doing for the past few decades.
All our media channels, in both physical and digital spaces, will be flooded with this low-effort AI garbage from here on out. This is only the beginning. We'll need to use aggressive filtering and curation in order to find quality media, whether that's done manually by humans or automatically by other AI. Welcome to the future.
In fact, it's not hard to imagine people using AI tools even if they're slower, more expensive, and yield worse quality results in the long run.
"When all you have is a hammer...".
LLMs -- Awesome and useful. Disruptive, and somewhat dangerous, but probably more good than harm if we do it right.
'Generative art' (i.e. music generation, image generation, video generation) -- Why? Just why?
The 'art' is always good enough to trick most humans at a glance but clearly fake, plastic, and soulless when you look a bit closer. It has instilled somewhat of a paranoia in me when browsing images and genuinely worsened my experience consuming art on the internet overall. I've just recently found out that a jazz mix I found on YouTube and thought was pretty neat is fully AI generated, and the same happens when I browse niche artstyles on Instagram. Don't get me started on what this Sora release will do...
It changed my relationship consuming art online in general. When I see something that looks cool on the surface, my reaction is adversarial, one of suspicion. If it's recent, I default to assuming the piece is AI, and most of the time I don't have time or effort to sleuth the creator down and check. It's only been like a year, and it's already exhausting.
No one asked for AI art. I don't understand why corporations keep pushing it so much.
Anyway, the guitar is AI generated, and it's really bad. There are 5 strings, which morph into 6 at the headstock. There's a trem bar jammed under the pickguard, somehow. There's a randomly placed blob on the guitar that is supposed to be a knob/button, but clearly is not. The pickups are visually distorted.
It's repulsive. You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar? I so badly want to cover it up.
But let's say that the business itself is doing good and there truly is a need to improve the tech now to help do even better. In that case, DO NOT DO A FULL RE-WRITE. DO NOT. sorry for caps but it is important.
Like many others have already suggested, start with a smaller piece and improve it. May be create a separate API/service. Then measure the improvement in developer time and customer happiness linked to it. Build that slowly over time.
"I want to keep things simple, and avoid bringing in too many dependencies, so I am leaning towards a minimal set of Symfony components, rather than something like Laravel"
That is good thinking.
"One of the primary complaints we get is that our current system is too slow. In part, this is because most actions trigger a full page reload."
Instead of a full rewrite, focus on improving te performance here. Yes, a full rewrite sounds exciting but how will that impact the business ? Instead, what if you figured out a way to improve the current performance bottleneck first ?
Remember that customer don't care about tech. They care about a solution that solvs their problems fast, efficiently at a reasonable price.
I am also concerned about the fact that a junior dev is being asked to rewrite. I understand it is just 4 of you but depending on the number of customers you serve, do not take this lightly.
Source: I have built software and run my own SAAS. 20+ years of experience breaking shit in production.
If OP is basically soloing a rewrite of an 11 year old company, they seriously need to consider asking for a new title
I would guess this number is higher today
I saw a video where an American was trying to order a McFlurry at McDonalds in Japan and the worker couldn't understand "McFlurry" pronounced in English so they had to pronounce it in what (without context) would sound quite racist.
This was my experience in Japan as well. So many words we're used to saying in English use mouth shapes that the Japanese language does not, so you really have to tweak how you say things to align with what's available.
"Coffee" is a fun one for the tired westerner
Hell, Schott will sell you a pair of made in the USA goodyear welted boots for 300$.