To see it as "kek" you'd have to be Alliance.

Those ads are not for workers, they're for the employers.

Not sure about the underlying reason, but I use Windows for work and the only program I've encountered in the past two years with this behavior is the Eclipse IDE. Everything else deals very well with rescaling and docking / undocking to 4k displays.

> It's a terrible long term lubricant (because it's designed to evaporate, it actually concentrates gunk and grime).

I recently read that WD40 isn't actually a lubricant but a lubricant remover. So as you write you'd use it to remove gunk but then follow it up with an actual lubricant.

On the last two bottles of WD40 I came across (im Germany) I checked the back and it indeed said that it's not a lubricant but a lubricant remover.

(Disclaimer: can't read the article past the intro where it does call it a lubricant...)

Yes, it's more correctly labelled as a solvent. Part of their marketing secret is that their product is inherently "addictive" in a way - it can loosen up things quickly but also make them seize more quickly. Which gives users a sense that they constantly need to re-apply WD-40 when most of what you are doing is cleaning up the mess of the previous application.

Just like Carmex lip balm. The stuff everyone was “addicted” to in the 90s

Two years ago I did some cleaning up and finally sorted out the gaming PC from my youth. I believe I bought it around 2007. Ran some old AMD dual core (may have been an Athlon 64 4400), still had an HDD. Installed on it was Windows Vista, which wasn't exactly a crowd favorite. So as I went to backup the final remnants of those gaming days I was flabbergasted by the snappiness of the explorer. Folders just opened instantly! So snappy, it was actually fun just navigating through all the folders. I had been expecting this PC to run at snail's pace, yet the windows experience was much better than on my desktop PC built in 2021 running Windows 10 on an NVMe drive. I have no idea how that is possible, but since then with every interaction with modern Windows there's just this tiny tinge of sadness...

HDD performance on Windows just died after some Windows 10 update. Sure, it took two minutes to boot 7 of an HDD, but once it was going, Explorer ran fine, and Firefox would run fine after that (probably cached after boot).

Same goes for day one Windows 10 (they probably didn't touch the relevant parts). I remember having to deal with a Windows 10 machine on an HDD, and it was mostly fine after it booted, but even clean installs on more recent version are just horrible. There's probably been some optimisation done which works fine on SSDs but just thrash HDDs, and HDDs as boot drives just aren't a thing anymore (within margin of error), so it didn't matter.

The fact that they've managed to throw so much bloat on top that even SSDs start struggling though, that really is something.

A major culprit is background processes that scan the drive in the background, like CompatTelRunner.exe. Works fine if you're on an SSD, but grinds an HDD to a halt. They also forgot about their own I/O prioritization API from Vista, so it also spammed I/O at Normal instead of Background priority in the early versions. Not to mention the periodic Defender scans, the Malware Removal Tool scan that runs before each major update, etc.

Similarly, Windows Update used to consume ungodly amounts of CPU time because the update system would write a multi-hundred megabyte text log and then spend forever compressing it for upload. Then they remembered their own ETL system and switched to much more efficient binary logs.

Firefox also has problems on HDD, I remember it locking up for minutes at a time doing cache maintenance until I switched permanently to SSDs.

With write-amplification, SSDs are being thrashed even more than HDDs would be, the SSDs just accomplish it quicker :\

Much worse than it was only a year ago.

My guess would be yes, it's cultural. I'm not Indian but spent about 5 months there. Overall my impression was that people act much more on direct feedback.

It would be typical to do the first thing that comes to mind, then see what happens. No negative feedback? Done, move on. Negative feedback? Try the next best thing that makes the negative feed back go away.

People will not wonder whether they might bother you. Just start talking. Maybe try to sell you something. That's often annoying. But also just be curious, or offer tea. You react annoyed and tell them to go away? They most likely will and not think anything bad of it. You engage them? They will continue. Most likely won't take "hints" or whatever subtle non-verbal communication a Westerner uses.

I found it quite exhausting in the beginning, it feels like constantly having to defend myself when I want to be left alone. But after I started understanding this mode and becoming more firm in my boundaries, I started to find it quite nice for everyday interactions. Much less guessing involved, just be direct.

Professionally I haven't worked much with Indians, but my expectation would be that it's necessary to be more active in ensuring that things are in track. Ask them to reflect back to you what the stated goal is. Ask them for what you think are obvious implications from the stated goal to ensure they're not just repeating the words. Check work in progress more often.

Great article!

I think there's a small problem with intermediate values in this code snippet:

  const maxValue = Math.max(...samplingVector)

  samplingVector = samplingVector.map((value) => {
    value = x / maxValue; // Normalize
    value = Math.pow(x, exponent);
    value = x * maxValue; // Denormalize
    return value;
  })

Replace x by value.

Just pushed a fix, should be live in a minute or two, thanks again!

This loop is similarly suspect:

  let maxValue = value;
  for (const externalIndex of AFFECTING_EXTERNAL_INDICES[i]) {
    maxValue = Math.max(value, externalSamplingVector[externalIndex]);
  }

Good catch, thanks! I’ll push a fix once I’m home

Connecting train doesn't mean that it runs on the same tracks. The train stations where you would switch tend to have ~6 to ~20 different platforms.

Presumably Data Engineer.

Modern cars have several microphones or directional microphones and can isolate a speaker.

I think well-done voice commands are a great addition to a car, especially for rentals. When figuring out how to do something in a new car, I have to choose between safety, interruption (stopping briefly) or not having my desires function change.

Most basic functions can be voice-controlled without Internet connectivity. You should only need that for conversational topics, not for controlling car functions.