My brother passed away from AML (acute myeloid leukemia) almost two years ago. His quality of life was dismal on treatment, he was constantly vomiting, mouth sores, unable to sleep but very tired, couldn't see his two young children and locked away in a hospital ward. His wife had to make a huge effort to see him consistently because she couldn't bring the kids and had to find babysitters. He made the decision to stop treatment because of that. His chances were low anyways and he pursued 'alternatives' because it was better than nothing. Even if the main benefit was to make him and his family feel like he wasn't completely giving up.
Readit Newsiamthepieman commented on Our sister died because of our mum's cancer conspiracy theories, say brothers bbc.com/news/articles/cre... · Posted by u/muglug
They should start to ban water usage to grow Alfalfa. It consumes so much water and is very inefficient.
The worst part is that a lot of the alfalfa and other feedstock crops are shipped out of the country.
Plasma from teachers who don't get paid enough to cover the bills shipped to Europe. There's a great sci-fi novel in there.
The film "Never Let Me Go"[0] is kind of about that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(2010_film)
iamthepieman commented on Made in America: The Price Tag of Patriotism newinternet.tech/p/made-i... · Posted by u/jeffmorrisjr
Framing the whole thing around costs is the problem. Frame it around better quality, better service, buy it for life etc.
There's no way I'm going to buy 3 times the cost for the exact same experience. I don't care about free returns I want something that has no returns because it's reliable and better engineered and made. I'd much rather have 2 widgets that I never have to worry about again (or they can be repairable that's fine too) than 10 widgets, two of which I need to find a box to return them, one of which has intermittent problems that don't quite make it worth it to return OR use, one of which was cheap enough I bought on a whim but was never really going to use anyways etc.
Actually more expensive, fewer, better, things sounds great now that I've written this out. Less mental and physical clutter.
But of course most people don't see it that way and business have to earn trust around these alternative ways of thinking about our relationships with our "stuff". Slapping a "Made in the U.S." sticker on something is gonna do nothing though.
Oof. This post started so good and then got progressively more sad until the edit nailed it home. I hope your story continues and works out as a huge win, either as a new, good boss, you getting to openly lead this kind of thing, someone reading this and poaching/sponsoring you, or maybe even you working on this under your own name.
Good luck and we're rooting for you!
Thank you for the enthusiasm!
It was not intentional but my post really does read like a little story vignette that ends with a gut punch.
Not looking for sympathy so much as fellow appreciators of irony and schadenfreude but here's another kicker.
I pitched this idea to my previous company and was told there was no appetite for it. Just saw on my old company's blog that they released a "digital transformation in a box" program for mid-market clients in this space which is 90% of what I pitched to them. Bad and hilarious timing all around.
Creating stealth group in a huge Fortune 500 company with the blessing of my immediate boss but no other higher-ups. Trying to productize critical consulting tool sets in the utility industry so we can stop repeating ourselves for the 100th consulting engagement.
Yes, customer is a special snowflake but they still need 90% or whatever every other client in this industry needs.
Feeling increasingly like this is a fools errand.
Even though we've proved this out with tool sets strung together with duct tape and safety pins, and are therefore the most profitable group within our department, we still need to be 100% billable.
It's only because we're the most profitable group that we can pretend we're all billable while I work with two other people to bootstrap this crazy project
Edit: anyone hiring? Just found out my boss is quitting.
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iamthepieman commented on Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust blog.startifact.com/posts... · Posted by u/robin_reala
This, thirty years later, is the best pitch for XML I’ve read. Essentially, it’s a slow moving, standards-based approach to data interoperability.
I hated it the minute I learned about it, because it missed something I knew I cared about, but didn’t have a word for in the 90s - developer ergonomics. XML sucks shit for someone who wants to think tersely and code by hand. Seriously, I hate it with a fiery passion.
Happily to my mind the economics of easier-for-creators -> make web browsers and rendering engines either just DEAL with weird HTML, or else force people to use terse data specs like JSON won out. And we have a better and more interesting internet because of it.
However, I’m old enough now to appreciate there is a place for very long-standing standards in the data and data transformation space, and if the XML folks want to pick up that banner, I’m for it. I guess another way to say it is that XML has always seemed to be a data standard which is intended to be what computers prefer, not people. I’m old enough to welcome both, finally.
>XML has always seemed to be a data standard which is intended to be what computers prefer, not people
Interesting take, but I'm always a little hesitant to accept any anthropomorphizing of computer systems.
Isn't it always about what we can reason and extrapolate about what the computer is doing? Obviously computers have no preference so it seems like you're really saying
"XML is a poor abstraction for what it's trying to accomplish" or something like that.
Before jQuery, chrome, and web 2.0, I was building xslt driven web pages that transformed XML in an early nosql doc store into html and it worked quite beautifully and allowed us to skip a lot of schema work that we definitely were ready or knowledgeable enough to do.
EDIT: It was the perfect abstraction and tool for that job. However the application was very niche and I've never found a person or team who did anything similar (and never had the opportunity to do anything similar myself again)
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