Sounds very grim. I live in a snowy part of Europe and very little of this applies, except the stay dry and warm part. Here are 2 things I learned:
1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.
There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.
2. Buy gear locally.
There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.
I'm in California. We have good cold-weather gear, you just have to get it from the right kind of store, specifically one that supplies outdoor workers.
Maybe California is a bad example. What I'm getting at is the selection for what you need is usually larger and more applicable to the conditions locally.
I see plenty of tourists with winter gear that is either insufficient, or completely over the top. Whereas if you buy locally you'd generally find the right stuff.
I think the bigger problem is that many of the tourists don't normally spend time outside, so they are used to only having enough gear for a heated building or car, even at home.
I've actually come around to the Postgres way of thinking. We shouldn't want or need plan hints usually.
Literally every slow Postgres statement I worked on in the last few years was due to lack of accurate statistics, missing indexes, or just badly designed queries. Every one was fixable at the source, by actually fixing the core issue.
This was in stark contrast to the myriads of Oracle queries I also debugged. The larger older ones had accumulated a "crust" of plan hints over the years. Most not so well thought out and not valid anymore. In fact, often just removing all hints made the query faster rather than slower on newer Oracle versions.
It's so tempting to just want to add a plan hint to "fix" the suboptimal query plan. However, the Postgres query planner often has an actual reason for why it does what it does and overall I've found the decisions to be very consistent.
>I've actually come around to the Postgres way of thinking. We shouldn't want or need plan hints usually.
They only come out at night, mostly.
PG is 40 years old and still has planner bugs being fixed up regularly, and having no control and waiting for a new version when a hint could fix the issue at runtime is an obvious problem that should have been addressed long ago.
It's great the devs want to make the planner perfect and strive for that, it is an unattainable goal worth pursuing IMO. Escape hatches are required hence the very popular pg_hint_plan extension.
But in the end after many years of dealing with these things I have come to the opposite conclusion, let the query language drive the plan more directly and senior devs can fix juniors devs mistakes in the apps source code and the plans will be committed in source control for all to see and reference going forward.
SQL comes from an idea of non technical people querying a system in ad-hoc ways, still useful, but if you are technically competent in data structures and programming and making an application that uses the db, the planner just gets in your way at least in my experience.
If I could go back in time and change what courses I took for my CS degree, it would be the exact opposite.
I wish I'd gone more into theoretical computer science, quantum computing, cryptography, and in general just hard math and proofs.
I took a few such courses and some things have genuinely been useful to know about at work but were also mind-expanding new concepts. I would never ever have picked up those on the job.
Not to say the practical stuff hasn't been useful too (it has) but I feel confident I could pick up a new language easily anytime. Not so sure about formal proofs.
I had to take some literature classes in high school, and had a truly exceptional teacher who facilitated great and interesting discussions. Really opened up my mind and I only later realized how lucky I was.
Those summaries always existed, in the past you could buy them as little books for most of the classic literature we read. Thing is they were always the same trite points even back then.
Our teacher would see right through any BS, but never call it out directly. Instead there would be 1 precise and nicely asked follow-on question or even just asking their opinion on a talking point. Not details, but a regular discussion question.
If someone hadn't read the book they'd stutter and grasp at straws at that point and everyone knew they hadn't actually read it.
On the other hand if you had read the book the answer was usually pretty easy, and often not what the common summaries contained as talking points.
So cheating not only didn't work, the few regular cheaters we had in our class (everybody knew who those were) actually suffered badly.
Only in hindsight did I realize that this is not the normal experience. Most other literature classes in fact do just focus on or repeat the same trite points, is what I've heard from many others.
It takes a great teacher to make cheating not "work" while making the class easy, intellectually stimulating and
refreshing at the same time.
My experience was the exact opposite. I loved reading as a child. But I learned very fast in school that my "own opinion" on books results in bad grades, while reading and reiterating the "official summary" results in OK or even good grades. Like you say, the summaries existed long before AI. It is what the teacher and students make of the class.
My 49 inch Dell ultrawide is failing too. One USB port is already dead, and the other ports have just now started to develop intermittent issues as well.
In theory, the problems highlighted in the article would have become apparent shortly into the process of assigning an icon to every menu item. Forging ahead despite the impossibility of doing a good job on the task is a sign of orders being issued from top to bottom without feedback working its way from the bottom to the top.
I'm afraid you both may be right in this case. "Make it blue!" - stakeholder. "Ok, but then we'll have to change everything for consistency." - VP of UI. Produces the horror that we have today.
Not only that but also the same short videos keep repeating. I have tons of great suggestions from Youtube on the main feed from creators I like, yet the Shorts feed is almost 90% garbage and AI slop.
It's deliberate, I'm sure. People say they want the vegetables, but then go on to watch hours of fast food / Shorts. Clearly the algorithm knows.
1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.
There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.
2. Buy gear locally.
There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.