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Comment Re:But the real cost is increased service prices (Score 1) 66

Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

Comment Re:That makes sense. (Score 2, Insightful) 61

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

Comment Re:Stop purchasing Bambu products (Score 2) 102

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?

Comment Re:Larger teams will move faster than smaller team (Score 1) 85

No, it's more about how teams work. Teams have a scope. They don't typically go beyond that scope. So if my team owns the Foo and Bar modules, I work on those. But if there's little important work on Foo and Bar, but a lot of important work to be done on Baz, it's generally organizationally difficult for us to work on Baz. Typically we need to be lent out by our manager and seconded to the other team. Which can be a lot of red tape and politics.

Now if you're imagining some alternate world where programmers an be moved at will- then we're already one big team instead of multiple small teams.

And no, a smaller team doesn't win every time. If it did, then then smallest team possible is teams of 1 and we'd all do that. There are sweet spots, which depend on the organization, the work to be done, and the importance of that work. For some that's bigger, for some smaller. I've definitely worked on teams that were both too small for the work, and that were too big.

Comment Re:Larger teams will move faster than smaller team (Score 1) 85

They can, under some circumstances. If the scope of what they work on is too small to fill the team's feature set. Or if the work they would be doing is significantly less important than other work to be done, having them in one large team makes it easier to move to more important work and can get critical features built faster. In that case it may not be overall more work done, but it may move the important stuff quicker. If larger teams weren't useful on some level, we wouldn't have teams at all- we'd all be individuals.

Comment Re:Depends on your goals, I guess. (Score 1) 85

In the end- good engineers with sufficient experience and support will get stuff working with any methodology. Bad ones or ones insufficiently supported will fail with any methodology.

There are some things that agile works well for, but it's really limited to domains where you can quickly build something tangible for feedback and you have stakeholders willing and able to give frequent feedback. UIs are a good example. It's a horrible fit for anything that requires actual research, or that can't be shown to low technical knowledge customers frequently (in other words anything that actually needs weeks or months of backend work, algorithm writing, or infrastructure to be written).

Comment Re:One behemoth isn't a trend (Score 1) 85

The problem with that is the skills needed to manage and the skills needed to do real work (let's take programming as an example) are pretty distinct. Someone can have both, but they tend to have one or the other. Forcing those without the skills to do the practical work into doing it doesn't actually help the team, it just slows everyone down. And if they get on the critical path of any project you can be royally fucked.

There are a couple of ways to solve this problem:

1)Larger team sizes. This can work if the team owns enough to keep everyone busy, but it can lead to effectively being independent subteams calling themselves one team while being inconvenienced by each other.

2)Each manager managing multiple independent teams. This can work if it doesn't overload the manager. The biggest problem is when the manager decides one team is more important and doesn't support the other(s) enough. This works better the closer the teams are, as it requires the manager to know fewer sets of collaborators and politics

Comment Re:What? (Score 4, Informative) 65

Back in the day lots of people did. Because there was no built in browser to use before IE came out. And pirating it would require getting a cd from someone else, and cd burners weren't a thing yet. Your options were use AOL with whatever they had built in on their cds, or use Netscape which you'd need to buy.

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