> I was being exposed to engineering concepts that just weren't a thing in agency work: unit testing, CI/CD, git hygiene, release management.
As someone who’s worked at an agency that’s grown from twenty engineers to hundreds over the last five years, what? Even when we were small and scrappy we still wrote unit tests…
My experience was 100% different (but also 6+ years ago). Margins just weren't enough to build it into estimates and it was nearly impossible to sell it to clients as a line item.
“Tending bar” puts more emphasis on what one might argue is the more important part of the phrase. No one is there for the tender. Consider versus “woodworking”: you want the work, not the hunk of wood.
We need a publicly funded body whose purpose is to issue grants for firms to reproduce scientific findings. A scientific reproduction corps. Extra can be awarded for finding flawed/fraudulent research. This would create a community of organizations that counter-balance industry incentives and instill trust in our scientific process.
Would you still have, if you knew the strings that would come attached? Tracking your every move? Enabling governments to surreptitiously snoop on your audio and camera? Constant exposure to experiences designed to addict and immiserate you?
I think it's good that people are aware of the downsides to everyone-has-a-smartphone and I'm glad there are people like Snowden who have made us all very aware of that. And I think it's good people are trying to find ways to avoid the downsides.
But I also think it's easy to take all the incredible benefits for-granted and only see the downsides. I remember what it was like 30 years ago and I much prefer now. Do you remember having to go to a physical location (library or town hall) to look things up? Basically no-one bothered and we all blundered around believing whatever some bloke in the pub had told us about.
We all have the world in our pocket now and it's amazing.
(Yes we have the problem of bubbles and misinformation but I still think information abundance wins out over information drought)
The number of people who carry smartphones around means the answer to this is almost certainly yes.
Also no one snoops on your audio or camera despite the paranoia around it, there's no need to. You can get all the info you need much more efficiently and accurately other ways.
So, maybe, the washing machine could have a... web page? No proprietary app store (where the app disappears when not updated to support the new OS version), no installation, usable from any device?
It’s not always possible to have a personal laundry machine available. Is it too much to ask that the machines also accept a credit card scanned in-person?
The solution is trust. Crowd sourced reviews are junk because you don’t know who wrote them, what their intentions are, or if they are in any way qualified (whatever that means to you) to review a book. With well known and trusted reviewer, you understand their biases and can adjust accordingly.
I don't think the issue here is about mmm individual being able to trust reviews. It's more about authors being pressured to write along certain lines due to hordes of basically bots upvoting/downvoting.
