You're not describing the domain knowledge I'm talking about.

I'm talking about things specific to a company. The gas account number for replacing tanks on the forklifts. Who sets up direct deposit for payroll. Things like "which customer needs to be coached to come up with good requirements," or "this is how we lay out our database tables so that our home-brew replication system works properly," are company domain knowledge. Hell, just getting credentials to check out and check in projects in source control - and how those projects are organized - is domain knowledge for the company. I say this as someone who's had to scan 2 terabytes of legacy code looking for what ~might~ be the right project.

Heck, even just finding out that certain projects push on a 2 week cycle, while others require a change control board to meet and certain folks on it block anything but a certain type of enhancement is domain knowledge.

You can't know it in advance. You learn it bit by bit, and often you don't even know that it's there to learn, so you can't even ask until you trip over it. It slows you down to a crawl and obliterates any advantage you might had have with better skills or non-domain knowledge, and you have to chip at it until it's no longer a barrier.

You'll often get strong willed, potentially sharp people coming into a new position and thinking that they can get away just doing it their own way, but that's really just a way to push the work they're unwilling to do on everyone else and force them to adapt.

If it's not absolutely unique to the place you're working and in some cases, the job you're working, it's not what I'm talking about.

Domain knowledge is knowledge that you would only have by working at that job or at that company. You can't train for it, you can't 'know it', you can only gain it over time.

Now, you might be able to trace code a bit faster (except that bit where they muck with the class loader and the config is in a database) or fix a build (except they're using a homebrew system), or maybe even optimize a SQL request (except they require that you go through sprocs and have an actual DBA sign off on it), but you're going to be going slow at first, even if you could technically do everyone else's job at the same time.

That's just how it is. That's also why you should pretty much apply for anything: there's a good chance you could do it - and what's on your resume or their job request is really only 20% of what the job really is.

There's been this big interest in boardgames recently, and the state-of-the-art as it is has actually moved forward quite a bit from what it used to be. We used to be restricted to two general types: roll-and-move games where individual skill was mostly non-existent or fixed-position games like chess and checkers where in general, the person who had memorized the right patterns would usually win.

So the question I heard was, "How would you sell chess today if no one had heard of it, and you wanted to sell it via a kickstarter?"

There were a bunch of amused suggestions on how to alter the game to make it appeal; variable start positions, variable player powers, a combat system, concepts like flanking, environmental hazards, etc. But let's focus not on the suggestions, but the problems that these suggestions reveal.

The primary one is it's replayability. Listen, games are meant to be entertainment, and your time is not free. You're spending valuable time effectively playing and replaying the same game over and over. It's always starting the same. The pieces are always the same. The board is always the same. The pieces always move the same. You always win the same way. If you've played it once, you've played it every other time.

So it's boring.

The next is player agency. See, chess is not a strategy game any more than the triangular peg jumping game is. It's a pattern recognition game. You know what you can do, and you know what your (1) opponent can do, every play of the game. There are no surprises, no choices other than piece position. There's also no other grand goals than "win". There's no need for a generalized policy to guide your moves. They're all mechanical, foreseeable, and given enough exposure to the game, you can recognize patterns and find the nearest-optimal play, and there's no reason you'd do anything but that. Though people are not quite at the level of computers, it's still pretty dull. I mean, they had to add timers in at some point.

So it doesn't involve much thought, just recollection.

Last, it's repulsive to new players. See, it's one of those games where new players don't have a chance. It's based on pattern recognition, allowing you to skip the actual simulation of moves ahead to a more general awareness of where 'ahead' is given a specific setup. So, the player with the most play time has a massive advantage over the other player that's hard to handicap. It's not like their opponent can do anything unexpected. So the new players are probably going to lose. A lot. Like a real lot. 2-3 hours per game potentially. After 40 hours of loses, you might just have enough to start recognizing enough patterns to help you win by anything other than opponent mistakes, but that's a pretty optimistic view.

So it's unapologetically harsh to any newcomer.

First, "Art" as a concept is silly.

I don't mean the concept of art, I mean Art with a capital A, as if it was some objective and unchanging definition which can be applied to any given activity, person, thing, or event in a way that resolves to an unarguable true or false value.

We know the definition of art is subjective, literally in the eye of the beholder (or failing that, in the eye of the popular consensus of a set of individuals who have self-assigned themselves the title of critic and whom have some level of recognition from their peers in the commercial world of art sales and thus govern the gross movements of the generalized collective subjective definition of art). So, the question is moot, especially given the long shadow cast by the word 'art'.

Of course they can, have, and will, given a specific definition.

A more valuable question is "does the pursuit of answers to this question provide any constructive value," and the answer to that is probably "No."

Which means it is a wonderful example of a stupid question.

People trying to eke the good out of video games pointed out that they radically improve hand-eye coordination, and in later generations of gaming systems and choices, spacial positioning and manipulation, scene analysis and pattern detection, and the ability to more easily comprehend and learn new systems.

Even more recently, there's been folks claiming that they improve communication and leadership skills.

I'm not going to go over the merits of those claims, but note that you can find anecdotal data to back up either side here, just as valid and nuanced as the original article (which is to say, not very).

Pull back just a bit though, and you can see that this is little more than the old chestnut that starts, "Back in my day, ." The corruption of our youth and the loss of our values is a pretty tired drumbeat, and until you do the studies, your "concern" that students are losing a necessary skillset is little more than a concern that they're doing things differently, and you're obsolescing.

I know not a lot of people have thought about this, but it's important. Passwords are one form of access rights. Keys are another. Heck, a secret handshake would be usable, if not entirely secure. The good ones though, they all have fundamental similarities:

* They can be changed
    Someone lets the password slip? Loses a key? The enemy gets the launch codes? ... you need to be able to change it
* They are reliable
    Ever get a drivers license that's valid 60% of the time?
* They can be transferred/communicated
    Leaving a job and your replacement needs access? Sold your car and the new owner would like to drive it?
* The correct form of access isn't easily accessible
    You don't tape the access code to the security door. You do use a key fob with a rotating access code. Etcetera, Etcetera.

There's others, like auditing and such, but the thing is, biometrics fail on every one of these to some extent. Ever try to give someone else your fingerprints, or change them? Did you know that your fingerprints will subtly change over time - or quite quickly in some cases; ever burn your fingers on an iron? They're not changable (in a deliberate sense), reliable, communicable, and their very nature makes them relatively publicly accessible.

They're not a replacement for passwords, and never will be, regardless of the level and sophistication of tech we arrive at. They're a way to provide convenience at the cost of security, like your amazon echo.

It's right there in the article, “There’s lots of rules that you might not think of until you see it happen the way you don’t want it,”

Well, if you told a computer to do EXACTLY the thing, and it's possible, they'll do EXACTLY the thing. If you said one thing, but meant another, they're not going to do what you mean, they'll do what you told them. So if your success metric is high score, and eating ghosts increases that, they'll eat ghosts.

In fact, this is how it works with people too. If you make a bonus based on lines of code (LoC) or bugs fixed, you'll find out that your programmers will end up creating long patches that have errors that require dozens of bugfixes, because that's what pays the bills. If your warehouse managers are rated on how many packages they ship, you'll find that they're shipping a lot - maybe not to the right places, but that's not what you're measuring them on.

This is only surprising to people who - as the quote above shows - have declined to think about what they're asking.

The fine ALSO includes forfeiture of the device and subjecting it to analysis, and legally their country can continue to heap more penalties on you if you fail to provide access once their lawyers are involved.

So, it's still probably 'not worth it'.

I actually worked for several years writing software that acted as both parts finder and deal match making between dealers in the replacement part market business, and agriculture parts were a large part of that market. AGCO in particular was an especially important customer of ours, and we put in quite a great deal of extra effort on their behalf.

It's just you were at the point where you needed specialists to even begin to approach the problem, and third party and aftermarket replacements were being squeezed out, while the new entires were just not competing in the same space. You're competing with not just the original sales but everything from sourcing to logistics, and they've got a lockdown on the entire national supply chain. Ever try to order a 80 lb part from mexico, delivered in under 2 days? It's not cheap.

It's a monopoly. They're leveraging their market share to continually make it harder to compete.

There's a lot of factors that work against them here.
At this point, it's an effective monopoly. They'll call it "market leader," but their "lead market position," makes it hard to produce cheaper tractors, or to compete in the same market for new equipment, either at scale or dollar for dollar.

For large farms, it works in their favor, so the biggest of the big appreciate having single vendor suppliers with dedicated staff and a rotation of equipment. So the big bucks still favor them anyway, and that's not likely to change.

However, this hits small farms especially hard. The equipment is good, but it's far more complex than your average commuter vehicle. Blow a sensor and your land lies fallow for a few days because the system will refuse to start the motor. You need an authorized repairman to come out, suss it out, source a replacement, and fix it. Half the time it's just them putting their authorization code in to restart while you're chasing daylight. Imagine every time your computer crashes, you'd need to get a microsoft tech out - even if you're running linux - to authorize you to reboot your machine? That's a 300-450 cost, a few hundred for the appointment plus $150/hr.

Not only that, these farms are on a fairly high risk/reward system. They have to pay out now, and the weather and markets dictate later what their effort was worth. They're risk adverse. It's hard to go with a new tractor, system, etc. Sure, the ability to fix it yourself is great, but not if you're required to exercise that right 5x more than you would with the known brand.

So there are folks out there trying to make replacements, but it's like trying to sell linux to the stereotypical mom. Sure, it can do as much, and yeah, technically it might be able to do more than that old chestnut, buuuuuuttt.... well, find a folk who refers to "the facebooks" and starts browser searches with "please," and see how far you get with them installing, configuring and using linux on their own. Oh, and it costs more than windows too.

That's the problem with a monopoly, it doesn't compete fairly in a capitalist market. They've locked down the product, the repair and replacement parts AND the repairmen, and ensured there's no realistic competition in any of those markets, and unlike apple, who's faced a lot of flack for attempting to deliberately lock out third party parts or repairs, they've successfully lobbied state and federal governments to double down on their farm equipment cartel. They're actually trying to make it not only difficult to do manually, and impossible to get the parts elsewhere, but they're trying to make it literally illegal. The claim is that you COULD modify software or settings which impact emissions and other features, which are protected by law, and therefore consumers can't be allowed to do so.

The fact that they could get a farmers right lobby group to effectively cave shows the power of their monopoly, and that's just another sign that it's not a free market.

George: "These one hour work days are killing me! Thank goodness it's only twice a week!"

Discrimination in a legal aspect is far different than discrimination - or should I say, categorization - by physical attribute. The latter should be allowed in the same way that the former should be defended against. That this article even exists is proof that some loud folks believe both types of discrimination listed above are the same. Otherwise, how could you consider that police using skin color in any aspect would be anything but normal, unless you somehow consider that to be wrong on some moral, ethical, or legal level? That's a problem, because at that point, it's just an attempt to whitewash reality with what today is considered politically correct. In fact, it sounds like .

Searching for suspects or describing victims based on known attributes is just a rational, good practice. Imagine if police were not allowed to consider gender, skin color, age, hair color, eye color, height, or weight in their official records. Imagine if it were hospitals that were not allowed to use those traits when treating patients.

Sounds absurd to you, like this is one of those 'taken to a logical extreme' examples that no one would ever consider?

Well, I've got news for you. It's already creeping in. Apparently the practice of using someone's apparent or legal gender and legal name for police reports is deeply upsetting to folks. The TG community calls it 'deadnaming,' and considers the use of the original or legal name to be violence, done both to the victim and to the TG community.

They're actually upset that the legal name and gender are being used by police in any capacity.

There's a good point in there, where their preferred name might be known and can be used while interviewing folks. The thing is, they say it like it's new, like there's not a 'known aliases' field somewhere. Or perhaps 'important notes: TG male to female, named X'. The folks advocating against deadnaming don't want that though. They don't want notes. They want this to be used for the official, primary fields. They state that even bringing up name in a historical reference about the individual should be disallowed, and go on to include things like parents (who might not approve) and so on.

Now, this isn't like other minority rights issues. For example, marriage is a legal definition that confers real legal entitlements, and the LGBT* marriage rights is about getting official recognition for any couples regardless of gender (which is what we should be doing, and is so obvious I have a problem even considering alternative viewpoints) . But that's not what this is. This is lying about reality to make someone feel good about themselves, or at least, not make them feel bad, or in the case that they've died, getting others to feel good knowing it won't happen to them.

Those advocating for absolute validity of personal feelings are going to be constantly confronted with the premise that the physical world doesn't care much about political correctness, and they're not going to just make their peace with it. I actually worry that we're going to have to legally protect concepts like critical thinking and scientific method as they're nickle and dimed away over time. ... well, I went off on a rant there. Anyway, let's not let political correctness become legally enforced stupidity.

No, you should not do away with conference calls. Speech is still a pretty quick way to share information, be it financial reporting, identifying issues and soliciting help, or even discussing technical issues. That you're not in a single room or don't have a live video feed isn't a real issue. Yes, in person meetings add body language, which really helps facilitate communication, but it's not going to stop you entirely.

I didn't read the article due to paywall, but from the excerpt above, it sounds like this person is whining about not being recognized for their role, or that individuals aren't getting credit for their statements, rather than being glad for the group effort to advance the event/project/whatever.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that they're also big into restating someone else's statement in calls to prove their worth and to show they're participating, even though it doesn't add any value to the call. I've seen a lot of folks like that who really reduce the info density of a call, and they're all about taking credit too.

On a positive note, if you can't see who's talking, and don't know them by their voice, perhaps you can judge what they say by it's own merits? If the ideas are valid, if the problems or solutions are real, is it a problem if it's coming from the intern and not the senior vp? Unless the issue is accruing kudos and credit.

It's a purely political move. Hatch has got his tongue so far up Trump's backside that he can taste what Trump's eating before he swallows.

Trump puts the hate out on google, Hatch responds by saying "Hey! I hate google too!"

I'm not saying that this isn't a smart thing to do, at least in the short term, but he's not concerned about antitrust or regulation. He's concerned about being on Trump's good side, and antitrust and regulations are the tools he happens to be using now to get that done. He's not suddenly into regulation, it's just that the ends justify the means.

https://projects.fivethirtyeig... proves this out, btw, if you're more interested in stats than clever metaphors about ass kissing sycophants.

One of my first successful programming tasks was editing the code of lemonade stand so it could recognize my name and my sister's name. It would give me more super-hot days, and while it didn't change the rate of days for her, every once in a while it would flash up a message saying "Meghan is a stupid head!" and then blink 3 times, then go away. That way when she got my parents, they wouldn't see that it was insulting her.

It was great fun.