I do have a smartphone, and every time someone asks me to install something on it, or ask for my phone number for "accumulating bonuses", I say simple and dry "no" looking into their eyes. When there's a queue behind me, they'll just show loading icon on their face a couple of seconds, and then proceed, because of pressure.

Otherwise, when there are no more people, they feel like wasting their and my time, I just stare harder in their eyes, and they feel ill at ease and back up rather quickly.

One example where IKEA hacking wouldn't have helped: I needed a thin (20cm) and short (80cm) locker for the bathroom. Ikea had nothing close to this -- at least 30cm thick and 1.5m tall. So, I searched Leroy Merlin catalogue fr the most suitable door facades (they weigh twice less than particle boards of the same size) -- and designed the locker around them. We've been using it for 2.5 years.

I had a broken cupboard in a rented apartment, and just built a new replacement one for €15. The bureau in the article could cost 2x..3x of this, which is still lower than overpriced IKEA furniture. (Good furniture, that isn't made of cardboard, is overpriced in IKEA.)

But then a number of examples are given, that suggest that degrees are orthogonal to skills and promotion, and instead being aggressive promotes better than excellency.

So how a compulsory degree would fix this corrupted promotion mechanism?

Translation:

  Somewhere inside IKEA.
  - How do we call the table lamp?
  - GNVOERK

Also what I learned back then was that accounting was invented for the same purpose the blockchain: to make fraud in the workplace very hard.

I remember engineers reinvent geospatial technologies, avoiding such thing as map projections, and in the end still came to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OCFfDStgM

Examples: under a sink, there were two 2m-long supply hoses, where 40cm would be enough, convoluted in a double loop together, to spare a visit to a DIY store. Or dowels made to be driven by hammer, for plastic baseboards, used to hang a cupboard (almost fell out). Or a too long corrugated plastic tube making a virage and another, unnecessary, water seal, and impeding outflux -- also to spare a visit to a store.

My impression is that most media today is nowhere near this. They're just cheap dopamine source, containing only "news", not any serious discussion.

"This ____ grills ______ on his comments about __________." -- this is typical American title, but in other countries this sort of news is abundant, and differs only in wording, not the essence.

A local media news: Lebron James died in a crash. Which happened at the other side of the world in another country, nothing to do with the place itself. Because the media is owned by a holding company, and metrics are measured and aggressively optimized.

Trump became a source of cheap dopamine for every non-serious media in the world. "American president said that X. ".

"Traffic jams in city X reached level 9!" (screenshot of a mobile map with traffic layer)

Sure, as you pushed it further, like add versioning to objects, things got very tricky and not guaranteed to work, and no way to fix.

But otherwise, yes, the attitudes look similar.

But before React, I don't recall frontend as very inspiring and joyful.

It was fun to see your work immediately on the screen. I did apply skills and had to solve some weird situations. I could optimize our CSS with OOCSS approach (later used in Bootstrap) -- only to complaints -- semantics! too many classes! (my trump card was that their commits contained +200 lines of CSS, while mine mostly had 0 -- and our CSS was already bloated into several megabytes).

But this was a dead end. I tried making tools to find out unused styles, to automate some patterns -- like click a button and load some content over Ajax. But the guys, who copy-pasted code with dumb solution to this, got 2-3x more tickets closed. I proposed a tool to make screenshots of pages and diff them to search for regressions, but the response was it's heavy RnD, we're not a research institute, we got to ship the next popup tomorrow, etc.

Nobody gave a shit much earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182425

Good point. So, it's not evil Commies that forced Cyrillic upon them. :)

Regarding Uzbekistan -- well, let's assume Latin won. I wonder how did it make them go off the influence of Russia? Until 2024 attacks and more anti-immigration push, they were quite in orbit, despite the fact that they got rid of this "propaganda and influence weapon" of Cyrillic.

Like, if you're on the USA/Israeli side in the current conflict, well, maybe quit using Arabic numerals, switch to Roman?

All these alternatives have a history of bloody colonialism. Any better options?