I am reading this article and thinking, darn there's going to be too many people like me trying to find these on the used market, and the prices will stay high.

Big fancy expensive powerstroke mega trucks with a person-high wall in the front look cool, and occasionally haul heavy things, but little white trucks that are busted up and 20 years old do all the duty. And those trucks drive way less than the range on the lightning each day. Once these lightnings price down to work truck level, I expect to see them on the road a long time.

Jackson's Calvinball footnote was not nearly as alarming as it should have been.

If I am familiar with sed, awk, grep and xargs, was I a sysadmin ?

If you are familiar with all of these but not C or Java or some other "traditional" programming language, then yes, I think anyone would guess you were a sysadmin. This was the type of background GP was talking about - people familiar with shell scripting but not any other programming language, who come by Perl for the first time.

I gotta tell you man, if you can find someone in charge at the backend of the Home Depot and let them hire you as a systems uptime troubleshooter you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.

I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week and let me tell you, they have a major systems problem that is making their operations look like a joke

Funny you mention, I'm actually working on that, too. There's an internal career portal with a large variety of backend jobs. No interviews, follow-ups, or anything yet.

Home Depot is a chain, so the backend is probably being handled from some R&D center somewhere. Your maneuvering area at the local home depot is probably pretty slim.

Back in the early 2000's I did consulting work with Home Depot's backend developers. Their office is the "store support center", which is in the NW suburbs of Atlanta. I remember the team as being very good, but surprisingly small.

These things tend to corellate :)

I've worked with a vendor listing products in their IDM (Item Data Management) System. IIRC, it's from https://www.stibosystems.com/ . From a SMB vendor supplying one type of product it's frustrating to work with, with a lot of back and forth and workflows for verifying all manner of compliance with data quality, global regulations, and laws. From their internal perspective, it's probably the bee's knees, supporting a wide variety of taxonomies, considering the variety of products they sell & support, some rather dangerous and hazardous.

From looking over the shoulders of the staff, some aspects of the system that I've seen as a supplier are directly visible to them too.

I worked for Home Depot's Canadian division up until last year when they laid me off. They do everything in-house out of Atlanta for US operations.

>you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.

>I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week

And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".

I am at 10 different supply stores too, Lowes, Ashby, Truitt and I get a shit ton of stuff delivered.

Everyone competes on price, so when I see everyone at Home Depot with their thumbs up their asses because the computers are down, I know that Ashby is eating their lunch on the margin. I'm sure Home Depot has enormous economies of scale that make up for it, but this is a current issue.

I don't think that's an appropriate conclusion to draw from a single point of data.

I think it's still a mostly correct conclusion. Pretty much everywhere you look across services, they've been cooked to their bones. Have you noticed that supermarkets seem to have, like, 1/5th the employees they did before? Since when is 1 open lane on a Saturday night and a 30 minute wait acceptable?

Well, since we've accepted it. Everything kind of sucks and barely works, but it doesn't matter, because we ultimately put up with it.

Yes but in construction the real order flow is delivery, which is why Home Depot bought GMS

And for that, around here they are my second or third call after FBM or MacArthur

~~~Problems on purpose because they don't spend the time to fix it IE not going to hire anyone to fix shit because they still make billions this broken way~~~~

Well coached juniors run through brick walls

Scrapping them off the wall is not pleasant, though. But throw enough of them at it, I guess the wall eventually goes down too.

Here's an idea. Print out a list of charities that you think she might give to, like a big glossy page with 5 choices, and throw in a few "Limited time double your contribution" type marketing slogans. Tell her next time she is going to buy something because it is on sale, she could consider the joy of giving to those in need.

> Then there’s the problem of widespread drug use. The availability and also the strength of street drugs is an extreme problem right now.

In 1875 San Francisco adopted an ordinance banning opium dens. A little history might provide some perspective.

The SROs discussed in the article were prominent long after that.

Modern synthetic fentanyl is a different situation than opium for many reasons, including the relative strength and difficult controlling dosages. The current opioid epidemic is really bad for drug users, even with historical perspective.

Fentanyl came around decades after the zoning changes targeting these.

The casualty is functional literacy, and at least half of the murder was handing smartphones out to children and then putting our lives on the web (social)

But AI is certainly going to be the death knell

This was the solution I was thinking about, but I thought, well that's the way someone would have done it 20 years ago

Alright but why do we not have more search engines that are actually good?

I'd love to cut myself off from Google, including Google Search, but any alternatives manage to be even worse. Consistently so. It's as if Google won the war by being just permanently slightly better - while everyone is actually really crap. That wasn't the case, say, 10 years ago or so.

These days I default to DDG. Not because it's improved but because Google's results are just that bad. Even a couple years ago I was reaching for Google with a lot more frequency.

Not all search is web-wide search. The best-known example of this is probably Amazon's search bar. No one really wants to search Amazon via Google. They have staffers contributing heavily to Lucene.

But also there are all kinds of other applications. Let's say you run a reviews site; you can build a bespoke power search form allowing people to sort on things like price, date of review, set a minimum star threshhold, etc. You can also weigh product names or review titles more heavily in the index scoring (a review /of/ the Pixel 10 should rank higher than a review that mentions the Pixel 10 prominently).

Even being able to sort results of searching blog posts or other dated content by date is powerful - Google can only guess at the actual dates of those posts. You can search with required tags, or weigh tags more heavily in result scoring. You can put your finger on the scale and say, effectively, post A should always rank more highly than post B for term X.

Also, site operators know traffic/popularity, which internet search engine can only sort of guess at, and can use this to score/sort. Amazon clearly does this.

For some reason a lot of web devs seem to think search is this really hard problem. But once you learn the basics of how it works, and if you use a library like Lucene, it does not need to be hard at all. Mostly you just have to be strategic and consistent about where and when you index and deindex content, it's usually alongside your db persistence calls. Once it's running you optimize by sprinkling some minimum amount of magic on your scoring setup to make it worthwhile/differentiated from Google.

Before Lucene, search was really hard

I use the '4get' proxy search engine, which lets you use pretty much every search engine under the sun, for both websites and images. It's really useful because it is faster than google, and if you need to find some pages you can just change the search engine quickly.

It is open source and there are many instances available, I use '4get.bloat.cat' or '4get.lunar.iu'

It is a better alternative to SearX for sure

I checked the about page on 4get.bloat.cat, and within the first paragraph of the "what is this" section, it used the phrase "globohomo bullshit". I dont think these are people I want to support.

Because it's not a simple problem space. Lucene has gone through about three decades of lots of optimization, feature development, and performance tuning. A lot of brain power goes into that.

Google bootstrapped the AI revolution as a side effect of figuring out how to do search better. They started by hiring a lot of expert researchers that then got busy iterating on interesting search engine adjacent problems (like figuring out synonyms, translations, etc.). In the process they got into running neural networks at scale, figuring out how to leverage GPUs and eventually building their own TPUs.

The Acquire Podcast recently did a great job of outlining the history of Google & Alphabet.

Doing search properly at scale mainly requires a lot of infrastructure. And that's Google's real moat. They get to pay for all that with an advertising money printing machine. Which BTW. leverages a lot of search algorithms. Matching advertisements to content is a search problem. Google just got really good at that. That's what finances all the innovation in this space from deep learning to TPUs. Being able to throw a few hundred million at running some experiments is what makes the difference here.

Have you tried Kagi?

More likely, this is a spectacular version of CYA. By billing the hours, there is a paper trail so that when the inevitable breach occurs, you can point to having done the appropriate thing.